Slashdot Mirror

Ultrasound Scanners (as used by pregnant women everywhere)
Solar hot water
A4 DSP chip
Aerogard, insect repellent
Atomic absorption spectroscopy
Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
Gene shears
Extended Wear Contact Lenses
Interscan Microwave landing system, a microwave approach and landing system for aircraft
Use of myxomatosis and calicivirus to control rabbit numbers
Parkes Radio Telescope
The permanent pleat for fabrics
Polymer (plastic) banknotes, or "funny money"
Relenza flu drug
'Softly' woolens detergent
X-ray phase contrast imaging
Buffalo fly trap
EXELGRAM (optical anti-counterfeiting technology)
RAFT (Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer) Polymerisation
The Mills Cross radiotelescope design
Supercapacitors
24 hour tests for Tuberculosis in animals and humans


It was also the CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope that beamed the Moon Landing.

CSIRO isn't a patent troll, they're a government owned R&D organisation. They get money from inventions, but who doesn't? Patent trolls come up with (obvious) ideas and never make it work. CSIRO actually patents completed inventions.

Some more achievements for you.

Ultrasound Scanners (as used by pregnant women everywhere)
Solar hot water
A4 DSP chip
Aerogard, insect repellent
Atomic absorption spectroscopy
Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
Gene shears
Extended Wear Contact Lenses
Interscan Microwave landing system, a microwave approach and landing system for aircraft
Use of myxomatosis and calicivirus to control rabbit numbers
Parkes Radio Telescope
The permanent pleat for fabrics
Polymer (plastic) banknotes, or "funny money"
Relenza flu drug
'Softly' woolens detergent
X-ray phase contrast imaging
Buffalo fly trap
EXELGRAM (optical anti-counterfeiting technology)
RAFT (Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer) Polymerisation
The Mills Cross radiotelescope design
Supercapacitors
24 hour tests for Tuberculosis in animals and humans


It was also the CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope that beamed the Moon Landing.

CSIRO isn't a patent troll, they're a government owned R&D organisation. They get money from inventions, but who doesn't? Patent trolls come up with (obvious) ideas and never make it work. CSIRO actually patents completed inventions.

Some more achievements for you.

Ultrasound Scanners (as used by pregnant women everywhere)
Solar hot water
A4 DSP chip
Aerogard, insect repellent
Atomic absorption spectroscopy
Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
Gene shears
Extended Wear Contact Lenses
Interscan Microwave landing system, a microwave approach and landing system for aircraft
Use of myxomatosis and calicivirus to control rabbit numbers
Parkes Radio Telescope
The permanent pleat for fabrics
Polymer (plastic) banknotes, or "funny money"
Relenza flu drug
'Softly' woolens detergent
X-ray phase contrast imaging
Buffalo fly trap
EXELGRAM (optical anti-counterfeiting technology)
RAFT (Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer) Polymerisation
The Mills Cross radiotelescope design
Supercapacitors
24 hour tests for Tuberculosis in animals and humans


It was also the CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope that beamed the Moon Landing.

CSIRO isn't a patent troll, they're a government owned R&D organisation. They get money from inventions, but who doesn't? Patent trolls come up with (obvious) ideas and never make it work. CSIRO actually patents completed inventions.

Some more achievements for you.

Ultrasound Scanners (as used by pregnant women everywhere)
Solar hot water
A4 DSP chip
Aerogard, insect repellent
Atomic absorption spectroscopy
Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
Gene shears
Extended Wear Contact Lenses
Interscan Microwave landing system, a microwave approach and landing system for aircraft
Use of myxomatosis and calicivirus to control rabbit numbers
Parkes Radio Telescope
The permanent pleat for fabrics
Polymer (plastic) banknotes, or "funny money"
Relenza flu drug
'Softly' woolens detergent
X-ray phase contrast imaging
Buffalo fly trap
EXELGRAM (optical anti-counterfeiting technology)
RAFT (Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer) Polymerisation
The Mills Cross radiotelescope design
Supercapacitors
24 hour tests for Tuberculosis in animals and humans


It was also the CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope that beamed the Moon Landing.

CSIRO isn't a patent troll, they're a government owned R&D organisation. They get money from inventions, but who doesn't? Patent trolls come up with (obvious) ideas and never make it work. CSIRO actually patents completed inventions.

Some more achievements for you.

Ultrasound Scanners (as used by pregnant women everywhere)
Solar hot water
A4 DSP chip
Aerogard, insect repellent
Atomic absorption spectroscopy
Distance measuring equipment (DME) used for aviation navigation
Gene shears
Extended Wear Contact Lenses
Interscan Microwave landing system, a microwave approach and landing system for aircraft
Use of myxomatosis and calicivirus to control rabbit numbers
Parkes Radio Telescope
The permanent pleat for fabrics
Polymer (plastic) banknotes, or "funny money"
Relenza flu drug
'Softly' woolens detergent
X-ray phase contrast imaging
Buffalo fly trap
EXELGRAM (optical anti-counterfeiting technology)
RAFT (Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer) Polymerisation
The Mills Cross radiotelescope design
Supercapacitors
24 hour tests for Tuberculosis in animals and humans


It was also the CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope that beamed the Moon Landing.

CSIRO isn't a patent troll, they're a government owned R&D organisation. They get money from inventions, but who doesn't? Patent trolls come up with (obvious) ideas and never make it work. CSIRO actually patents completed inventions.

Some more achievements for you.

Nice summary there, painting the CSIRO as some kind of patent troll. They never claimed that they had "[invented] the concept of wireless LAN", they claimed that they had developed some very clever algorithms dealing with rejecting interference and the like.

The frontpage of CSIRO says "Wireless LAN, CSIRO's #1 invention, is estimated to be in more than three billion devices worldwide.". That doesn't sound like they just invented some clever algorithms.

Their patent expires soon, it was granted in the US in 1996, it seem to be a hardware patent, they made a chip to do ‘fast Fourier transform’ to solve the problem of wireless signals bouncing off walls. The main inventor worked in radio astronomy, "Inspired to think about ways of cleaning up smeared radio signals to make searching for short pulses like those from exploding black holes easier." http://www.google.com/patents/US5487069 http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Media/CSIRO-honours-wireless-team.aspx

Actually, not too likely. The CSIRO is one of the few genuine research and development companies out there. The research they do is very useful to many Australians - and they do a considerable amount of work assisting third world countries with farming, food production and water sanitation. While they are taxpayer funded (being a government organisation), a good part of their research dollars come from patents on stuff they come up with. In this case, this is a patent that has been recognised by almost all the companies that make products with it as this snippet from Wikipedia explains:

In late November 2007, CSIRO won a lawsuit against Buffalo Technology, with an injunction that Buffalo must stop supplying AirStation products that infringe on the 802.11 patent.

On 19 September 2008, the Federal Circuit ruled in Buffalo’s favour and remanded the case to the district court ruling that the district court’s Summary Judgement was insufficient on the merits of obviousness of CSIRO’s patent. Therefore, this case was to be tried again before the district court. In this connection Buffalo was hopeful that it would shortly be permitted to, once again, sell IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g compliant products in the United States. On 13 July 2009 Buffalo announced the settlement of the patent infringement action.

As of 23 April 2009, the CSIRO has obtained settlements from most of the other organisations involved, including Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Asus, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Nintendo, Toshiba, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton and 3Com.

Furthermore, even this article on WIFI on Wikipedia has very explanatory information:

A large number of patents by many companies are used in 802.11 standard. In 1992 and 1996, Australian organisation the CSIRO obtained patents for a method later used in Wi-Fi to "unsmear" the signal. In April 2009, 14 tech companies agreed to pay CSIRO for infringements on the CSIRO patents. This lead to WiFi being attributed as an Australian invention.

It's sad to see how much effort they had to go through. This case is EXACTLY what patents are for: a bunch of scientists did some research and patented the results - companies took their results and made commercial products out of that and believed they could get away with not paying any kind of royalty or license fee.

The vast majority of this money will go back into further research, slowly making the world a better place.

For those who care to know (PDF): Their Most Recent Annual Report.

My understanding of the science (some of this is recent) goes like this on this point. If you look at "paleoclimate", what you get is that the last time it was as warm as it is projected to get, the sea level was meters higher. http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_proj_longer.html That is, the temperature may be predicted by models, but the melting is predicted by "history". What history lacks is a record of how fast things melt during rapid change, because past change was not as rapid as what is currently observed and predicted.

At the fast-melt end, there's this: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_15/ I followed the links and attempted to understand them, but did not to my satisfaction. One paper notes that we seem to be observing accelerating melt rates (but it is too soon to tell for sure). The other paper ( http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf ) is harder to understand. One issue is the difference in methods of estimating old temperatures; ocean sediment cores give one result, ice cores give another. If you believe ice cores, we have a couple of degrees C before we hit the icecaps-melt temperature; if you believe the ocean cores, we have a few tenths of degree C (i.e., we're essentially there now). Hansen also discusses much faster icecap disintegration, but I have not followed the reference chain all the way back to the papers that reached those conclusions (it appears to be based on more paleoclimate studies, and some inferences from the rate of temperature change then versus now).

And I've been trying to make sense of the Hansen predictions, because at the high end, they suggest rates as fast as 5 centimeters per year, occurring sometime later in this century, which I think counts as alarming.

Some coal seam gas wells must evacuate water from the great artesian basin for years before they can have anywhere near productive gas yields. Around the Injune area, I've seen these mind-bogglingly huge evaporation ponds - actually trying to transfer precious groundwater back into the sky

And although I've heard Santos are trying hard to make their reverse-osmosis plants work (that would be trying to pump water out of the aquifers at the gas extraction wells, and then back in somewhere I assume has no gas yield potential), they're having big problems making it work properly at scale.

I wish I had some better links, but it's of serious concern:

• http://www.csiro.au/news/~/media/CSIROau/Files/PDF/Coal%20seam%20gas%20PDFs/The%20Great%20Artesian%20Basin%20and%20coal%20seam%20gas.pdf
• http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/grappling-with-science-and-sceptics-20111111-1nbsg.html
• http://www.basinsustainabilityalliance.org/newsgroundwaterseminar.html

Almost 300 billion litres of water extracted with the gas annually. I've never heard what price Santos, Origin, QGC etc. are paying for this water: are they in fact paying any at all? And, "Millions of tonnes" of waste salt to be dumped somewhere.

I know the situation in Queensland. And I know how much influence the Queensland greens have on the state labor government there. The only conclusion I can draw is that the Greens are just as corrupt as the rest of them.

Posting AC, because I used to be closer to this stuff and should know better.

CSIRO, an Australian research organisation released research relating to mouse pox virus modifications that created a deadly virus precisely because it was hoped that it would lead to better treatments. They also surmised that governments around the world already knew about this but had kept it secret. http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001755.html

Really? Re-read the linked futurepundit article and the following abstract. Per the FP article, a US group was hired by the US Gov to re-create the same mousepox virus to investigate defenses; the Aussies did it by accident...

http://www.cse.csiro.au/research/rodents/abstracts/Abstract_Ylonen_2001_TREE_Rodent%20plagues,%20immunocontraception.pdf

From the abstract:

"Rodent plagues cause a major problem for agriculture in many temperate regions, and immunocontraception offers a new method to control fertility in these and other pest vertebrates. However, it is difficult to find an effective carrier for contraceptives for large numbers of pest animals in the field. In a new study, Jackson et al. manipulated the mousepox virus to boost the immune response in infected mice Mus musculus when testing the basis for controlling their fecundity rates. However, all infected mice (and half of recently immunized mice) died. Despite these unexpected and dramatic results of the engineering of mousepox virus, immunocontraception remains the most promising method for fertility control and management of pest vertebrates."

According to this and every other story I've read, the extreme lethality (100% of un-vaccinated mice!!!, 50% of recently vaccinated) of the engineered mousepox caught them very much by surprise. And this Dutch yahoo is flarking around with amplifying a human flu virus's lethality? Because he can? What sort of security does the lab employ? Any at all? The bad old USSR is had factories tooled to manufacture weaponized bio agents by the ton and worked on smallpox. Smallpox is already pretty bad; how bad when amplified or engineered? How much of that agent still exists?

OK, in the US, eco-nuts regularly break into labs with experimental animals and release them. Has this occurred in the Netherlands?

...Today, ALF has grown far beyond its British roots, becoming a significant international movement with an unknown number of members and supporters worldwide. ALF cells are or have been active in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain..--snip--.

pg 41, Eco-Terrorism - Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements

A heavy concentration of animal rights activity was located in the Scandinavian countries, with Sweden leading with 9.5% of all records in the database. Other countries represented in the database include Finland, Canada, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands.... --snip--,

pg 82, Eco-Terrorism - Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements And then there's that sentiment that humans are a plague on the earth, the population of which ought to be thinned.

"On 5 November, the upmarket Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3 aired a discussion about overpopulation between Dr Susan Blackmore (a neuroscientist) and Professor John Gray (of the London School of Economics). Dr Blackmore said the "fundamental problem" facing the planet today is that "there are too many people". Professor Gray agreed. Then Dr Blackmore declared: "For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed." Read more:

Nice work, but this is hardly the first of its kind...

A friend of a friend invented this concept while working at the CSIRO(those guys that invented the good wi-fi), in Australia.
He was even on a local show called "The New Inventers" where he showed it off, about 4 years ago, for the record.

This JPL model is definitely bigger, and badder, but NASA/JPL could have saved millions of dollars if they had a good look around every once in a while, or didn't fall asleep in front of the TV...

Credit where credit is dew. http://www.eoc.csiro.au/vsis/lidhome.htm

The original post is incorrect.

theSkyNet is working on HIPASS data initially, as a precursor to working on data from the CSIRO Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder when it comes online.

As numerous people have pointed out the site selection for the SKA won't be announced until next year

GPS accuracy is poor to non-existent within buildings and underground. Accurate sensor localisation is far from trivial in such environments. One hurdle is multi-path interference which renders the time-to-receive of a packet as near useless. AFAIK to achieve a high level of accuracy requires a mesh-like network and the use of multiple sensors including accelerometers with the accuracy increasing with the number of nodes in the mesh.

The CSIRO, Australia's peak science body is has been working on wireless tracking for a while. Don't know if they are involved with this new company Locata or not.

Maybe because Australian scientists have a good track record of innovation.

Maybe because Australian scientists have a good track record of innovation.

Maybe because Australian scientists have a good track record of innovation.

Maybe because Australian scientists have a good track record of innovation.

Maybe because Australian scientists have a good track record of innovation.

Maybe because Australian scientists have a good track record of innovation.

The slashdot crowd should definitly read "Limits to Growth" !
Twice a month there is a /. topic for which the most insightfull answer would be a key point from this book, but I barely see any reference to it.

Yes... it is sometimes called Club of Rome report and usually one think he knows what it is about after having read some random rant about it, written by people who haven't read the study either... Please, trust me: people really need to understand what it is about.

I do have read "Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update", the 3rd edition of this report written by Meadows' team.

The point is that they were remarkably right in their first report (1972).

If you don't have much time, at least read the book introduction and/or the abstract of this short study: A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality.

Contrary to popular belief, The Limits to Growth scenarios by the team of analysts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not predict world collapse by the end of the 20th century.

The whole book is very interesting, it has many facts about humanity Earth "burn rate".

What you should keep in mind: even with VERY optimistic discoveries, a good deal of technical breakthroughs, wise politics... in the very next decades we will face a growth halt and a decrease of average well being, production, etc. We could have maintained the well being and the population if we had done the right thing in 1990, but it is too late now to avoid this decrease.

We're in overdrive since the 90's, has many over studies show, often stated as "1,5 Earth needed". And no matter how optimistic you are, how strong your faith is in technical advances, this won't make ocean fish replenish as we fish more and more with advanced techniques, this won't make available oil fields expand as we discover less than we pump out (even with more advanced techs), this won't make damaged farmlands heal as we over-exploit more and more lands, etc.

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the "standard run" scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.

So where the point here ? This discussion is about Earth population but without any reference to this Earth simulation where all scenarios show that we're heading to a population decrease in the next decades.
I think the point is worth enough to be mentioned, to the least.

Are these the same guys who've been refusing SOI/FOIA requests because they claim that their work which is publically funded is 'proprietary'? Or are these the same ones from aussieland that made up the shit including forging the emails that they were being harassed.

No and even if they were that wouldn't justify sending them death threats. Also it doesn't seem to have come up on Slashdot yet, but the CSIRO has opened a site at http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/ where you can view the raw information about green house gas concentrations that has been collected in Australia.

Then again I can't really feel too much sympathy. People will only take a decade or two(maybe three) of doom and gloom based on fudged numbers, and corrupted policies. Especially when they realize that what you're proposing will effectively bankrupt the entire country and turn it into a 3rd world dirt farming nation.

Step 1. Build a global conspiracy supported by every major research organisation world wide suggesting that emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate and don't forget to suppress the voices of the brave and heroic rouge scientists and oil company researchers who attempt to reveal your conspiracy.
Step 2. Have governments world-wide introduces nation-bankrupting schemes to charge (some) people who bump lots of carbon into the atmosphere for that privilege.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!

Or something like that right? Looking at other countries, like for example NZ, which has a very very similar scheme to what is being discussed in Australia, the results so far have been positive, or is that just more misinformation?

Hell you don't even need to believe in climate change to see the need to encourage the uptake of more renewable energies. Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years. In the meantime as demand continues to rise, prices will go up and countries which don't have alternatives will hurt (a lot in the nation bankrupting sense).

On the Internet 99% of posters talking about "club of Rome" haven't read " Limits to Growth " !

They think they know what it is about after having read some random rant about it, written by people who haven't read the study either...

I do have read "Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update", the 3rd edition of this report written by Meadows' team.

The point is that they were remarkably right in their first report (1972). Of course they didn't anticipate specific crisis such as the subprime crisis, this isn't the report goal.

If you don't have much time, at least read the book introduction and/or the abstract of this short study: A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality.

Contrary to popular belief, The Limits to Growth scenarios by the team of analysts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not predict world collapse by the end of the 20th century.

The whole book is very interesting, it has many facts about humanity Earth "burn rate".

What you should keep in mind: even with VERY optimistic discoveries, a good deal of technical breakthroughs, wise politics... in the very next decades we will face a growth halt and a decrease of average well being, production, etc. We could have maintained the well being and the population if we had done the right thing in 1990, but it is two late now to avoid this decrease.

We're in overdrive since the 90's, has many over studies show, often stated as "1,5 Earth needed".
And no matter how optimistic you are, how strong your faith is in technical advances, this won't make ocean fish replenish as we fish more and more with advanced techniques, this won't make available oil fields expand as we discover less than we pump out (even with more advanced techs), this won't make damaged farmlands heal as we over-exploit more and more lands, etc.

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the "standard run" scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.

Linky here

Well, I asked the CSIRO and they said "The recent South-East Queensland (SEQ) drought was likely caused by shifts associated with climate variability over decades rather than climate change". Oh wait, you mean the floods. I asked the BoM who show this one was mild compared to historical events. See, there's this thing called El Nina that was responsible for the floods of the 1890-1900s, 1940s and 1970s as it was of the floods of today. Weather is not climate.

This csiro news page http://www.csiro.au/news/Broadband-coming-wirelessly-to-the-bush.html talks about how efficient the tech is. "CSIRO is achieving spectral efficiency of 20 bits per second per Hertz (20 b/s/Hz)" "CSIRO’s spectral efficiency is three times that of the closest comparable technology and the data rate is more than 10 times the industry’s recently declared minimum standard."

Essentially a sphere will be created of a specific isotope of silicon and a specific diameter. This sphere will have a known number of atoms. This is superior not only because of degradation of a physical standard, but also because it will be easier to create a standard from basic principles using appropriate lab equipment.

The US is quite late in it's objection as the problem has been known and accepted for many years. TIme and distance is essentially measured with light, and only the kilogram still has a physical representation.

It is probably a simple matter for the US to accept the new standard.

Open our governments R&D dept to beyond defense and license the tech out to the private sector to pay for our infrastructure, and help create a real need for scientists.

It's amazing other, more enlightened governments did not think of this before.

Create regulations to stop the salary collusion that goes on in every executive board room, bring back excess taxes to discourage excessive greed.

Good luck with that. They'll just find new ways to do you actually punish the companies involved, then they'll just re-incorporate in Dubai.

Plus you've got all the nutbars who think reducing taxes on the rich will result in more jobs (As far as I can figure out it works like this: 1. give the rich more money, 2. ????? 3. Jerbs).

Reform our tax structure to pay from the bottom up, instead of top down. Make my city pay to my state, who pays to the feds.

You mean how the lieutenants pay the Capo and the Capo's pay the Don?

This system has too many flaws, it will just result in one side holding the other hostage. It's better that Income Tax is collected on a federal level then levies and fees for services (such as land tax) is collected on a state and local level. In AU, Lgov (local Government) pays for garbage collection, so they charge each land owner in their district a yearly fee for council services (not just garbage collection). State Gov pays for roads, so the state gov collects the fuel levies so they are not entirely dependent on Canberra for funds.

Fine countries for each citizen found illegally residing in our country, *10 for repeat offenders.

Good luck with that...

Say about 90% of the illegal in my nation are Visa over-stayers from first world nations, we normally fine them individually but if we can just send that bill to Washington... when can I collect my check.

heya,

Well, as an Australian who's taxes funded the CSIRO research, I see no problem with it.

I mean, sure, we may pay more for those Wifi devices, but then so will everybody else - ultimately, they'll be net-flow in Australia's directions to the CSIRO, which they will use to fund more research.

The thing is, the CSIRO is very well respected, and has been consistently churning out good research, and helping pay PHD students since the 1920's...

I mean, they invented Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy. And Aeroguard - not sure if that's available overseas, but if you're an Australian you'll know what it is (a very good insect repellent). Polymer banknotes. Relenza (flu drug). Rabbit virii (Myxomatosis and calicivirus). And a few hundred other inventions - many with a heavy agriculture bias, simply by the nature of the needs in Australia, but they have branched out a bit, as the previous list shows.

Interestingly enough, they were also apparently the first Australian organisation to use the internet - and so were able to register the domain http://www.csiro.au/ (note the lack of a .com).

If a US government institute created something, and a Australian or a French company stole their invention, I don't think I'd see Americans up in arms about how unfair the patent system was...lol...in fact, I think they'd probably think well, fair's fair, they're a non-profit government organisation, so they'll collect the royalties and fund more research. Research labs don't build themselves, and in the case of human drugs in particular, clinical trials are *incredibly* expensive to run.

Cheers,
Victor

I do believe this patent covers the hardware and software implemented in every 802.11 wireless device.

According to this article the patent was granted in 1996 and the IEEE 802.11a standard was ratified three years later.

http://www.csiro.au/news/CSIRO-honours-wireless-team.html

The only reason the previous lawsuit settled instead of going to a jury trial is because the coalition of companies being sued knew the gig was up. If they thought they were in the right and were using their own technology then they would have gone to trial and probably won. Instead they backed down since they weren't using their own technology.

HERE IS YOUR FUCKING RAW DATA (because you are unvilling to search it for yourself -- and call yourself a skeptic...):

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2 [noaa.gov]
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/ [noaa.gov]
http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570.0/ [ucar.edu]
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER [antarctica.ac.uk]
http://eca.knmi.nl/ [eca.knmi.nl]
http://www.zamg.ac.at/histalp/content/view/35/1 [zamg.ac.at]
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/atdd [nasa.gov]
http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/mirador/presentNavigation.pl?tree=project&project=SORCE [nasa.gov]
http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/ [colostate.edu]
http://www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/data.html [pol.ac.uk]
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/dataexp.html [unizh.ch]
http://www.marine.csiro.au/~ttchen/argo/gmap.htm [csiro.au]
http://icoads.noaa.gov/ [noaa.gov]

YOU IDIOT!
Here you are, PLENTY of RAW datasets:

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/
http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570.0/
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER
http://eca.knmi.nl/
http://www.zamg.ac.at/histalp/content/view/35/1
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/atdd
http://mirador.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/mirador/presentNavigation.pl?tree=project&project=SORCE
http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
http://www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/data.html
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/dataexp.html
http://www.marine.csiro.au/~ttchen/argo/gmap.htm
http://icoads.noaa.gov/

Let me repeat:
YOU IDIOT

Excuse me? Like what?

I don't respond to AC's normally and I don't really need the Karma for this but...

Do you mean "what is CSIRO"?

Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation.

Or did you mean what are CSIRO's accomplishments (and I hope you're on Wifi being eaten by mosquito's for this one because Wireless LAN and Aeroguard are on that list).

CSIRAC was the forth stored program computer ever made and one of only two first generation computers still intact.

Accurate submeter 3D positioning is quite hard.

Hard but solved.

A very recent podcast with transcript (3. Jan 2010) called Aboriginal Astronomy from Radio Australia was about this topic, referring to this book Emu Dreaming by Ray Norris

If I remember correctly, LISA is sensitive to gravitational waves with a period of minutes, which we would expect from a neutron star binary system. A supermassive black hole binary system will emit gravitational waves with a much longer period - years, at least. These are more likely to be detected through pulsar timing projects like PPTA - essentially, these work similarly to observatories like LIGO or LISA, but instead of using an artificial laser as their input signal, they use radio pulses from pulsars. If the pulsars in one part of the sky seem to pulse a little earlier, and those in an orthogonal part of the sky pulse a little later, that would be an indication of a gravitational wave.

Thanks for the link, note the headline on the report includes the caveat "some". Here is a link supporting my claim from a similarly reputable source, note the conclusions are derived from observations not modelling. The WP entry on ocean acidification is also quite informative and includes a number of references. Also the ocean has been acidic in the distant past, softbodied animals dominated during those periods.

Finally I quote from your link - "“The oceans absorb much of the CO2 that we release to the atmosphere,” Ries says. However, he warns that this natural buffer may ultimately come at a great cost. “It’s hard to predict the overall net effect on benthic marine ecosystems," he says. “In the short term, I would guess that the net effect will be negative. In the long term, ecosystems could re-stabilize at a new steady state. “The bottom line is that we really need to bring down CO2 levels in the atmosphere.”"

• GHCN v.2 (Global Historical Climate Network: weather station records from around the world, temperature and precipitation)
• USHCN US. Historical Climate Network (v.1 and v.2)
• Antarctic weather stations
• European weather stations (ECA)
• Satellite feeds (AMSU, SORCE (Solar irradiance), NASA A-train)
• Tide Gauges (Proudman Oceanographic Lab)
• World Glacier Monitoring Service
• Argo float data
• International Comprehensive Ocean/Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) (Oceanic in situ observations)
• AERONET Aerosol information

You can follow the original link to realclimate.org to find many other links to data sources. I have posted the data sources above only because many critics of AGW won't even bother with realclimate.org as they are thought to be part of the conspiracy. The data exists and is public as is the source code.

Or, you could watch GoldenEye.

Also, for those that are not visually impaired, a Satellite View (2.6MB) and an Airplane View (3.5 MB)

All in all, the sea level rise is the same pace for over 150 years. Nonsense. http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_few_hundred.html (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.) Quote: "We have used a combination of historical tide-gauge data and satellite-altimeter data to estimate global averaged sea level change from 1870 to 2004. During this period, global-averaged sea level rose almost 20 cm, with an average rate of rise of about 1.7 mm/yr over the 20th Century. The sea level record indicates a statistically significant increase in the rate of rise between 1870 to 2004." (emphasis mine) CC.

I think you'll find CSIRO also found that the Maldives is affected by the fact they "mine" the protective coral reef for building materials thus exposing the islands to the sea with greatly reduced protection for the community. The odd thing is, they are still building large resorts, using coral. How fair dinkum is this fraud? I also believe you'll find that the oceans have not risen significantly over the 20th century. The rise, beginning in 1870 (the greatest rise in the earlier years) is due to the Little Ice Age ending. In addition, some parts of the Earth's surface are "sinking" and others are "rising" If the sea floor rises, of course sea water will be displaced. Additionally, there has been no change to Australia's National Datum (to my knowledge), neither have any airports been required to reset the local altimeter settings. Finally, there is no discernable rise in sea level in any major Australian port, at the many airfields that are on the shore, have a runway extending into the sea or are situated in areas of swamp. I always thought that water always sought its own level, so tidal effects aside, if the sea is rising in the Maldives it should be rising everywhere.

All in all, the sea level rise is the same pace for over 150 years.

Nonsense.

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_few_hundred.html (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.)

Quote: "We have used a combination of historical tide-gauge data and satellite-altimeter data to estimate global averaged sea level change from 1870 to 2004. During this period, global-averaged sea level rose almost 20 cm, with an average rate of rise of about 1.7 mm/yr over the 20th Century. The sea level record indicates a statistically significant increase in the rate of rise between 1870 to 2004." (emphasis mine)

CC.

His actual title appears to be "Executive Director, Commercial". They all seem to be phrased that way, presumably so the "Executive Director", "Group Director" etc bits of the title are all up front, rather than being buried at the end of lengthy domains like "Human Resources, Safety and Sustainability". As such it's really "Commercial Executive Director", which isn't so bad.

Under similar circumstances in Australia the CSIRO http://www.csiro.au/science/PestManagement.html , would investigate the weed species, find it's country of origin, find insects, bacteria or fungi that feed on it and then bring back samples under controlled conditions. These species would then be tested against Australian native plants and commercial species and those imported species that do not predate upon those would then be tested for survivability in the regions most affected by the weed species. Once the optimum control species are found they are released into the environment to control the weed species.

Although this is by far the most cost effective method of control it often not very popular in capitalism first, last and everything in between countries as there is no opportunity for profit in the solution as it must be given away free, to spread on it's own. In the case of the US the USDA http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/ is the likely agency that should be working on those problems on a federal basis. So rather than throwing away money on spraying and, spraying and, spraying, better to pursue the USDA and get them working on long term biological solutions, where it is all about saving money while saving the environment.

Well, compare yourself to Australia ... http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=NB03014.pdf Our population is about 1/12th that of the US, but our gun deaths are about 100th those of the USA. Also, since a draconian change to our laws, te gun deaths have fallen 50%. This is indicative of what the USA might become if it altered its current laws.

The problem was not the lines, which, as you note, is roughly equivalent to broadcast TV's.
The problem was that the vision from the moon was slow scan - i.e. 10 frames per second (see http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/ - a very good tale of the technical side of getting the signals back from the moon). The only way they had of converting that to the 50i or 60i signals of broadcast TV was a converter that basically consisted of a camera pointed at a long-phosphor CRT - although it was a single box containing both parts. If you want to know the details, check the article.
Also, http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/Parkes_Apollo11_TV_quality.html contains two pictures that compare a photograph taken from a SSTV display in '69, and the same frame from existing broadcast TV archives. Clearly shows why we want to find the original, unconverted recordings!

That said, I am ready to be disappointed: The news release seems to suggest that all they are releasing is filtered and cleaned up recordings of the broadcast TV - the originals are still lost, and, i greatly fear, have been mislabeled and subsequently destroyed in a 'clean up'.

The problem was not the lines, which, as you note, is roughly equivalent to broadcast TV's.
The problem was that the vision from the moon was slow scan - i.e. 10 frames per second (see http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/ - a very good tale of the technical side of getting the signals back from the moon). The only way they had of converting that to the 50i or 60i signals of broadcast TV was a converter that basically consisted of a camera pointed at a long-phosphor CRT - although it was a single box containing both parts. If you want to know the details, check the article.
Also, http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/Parkes_Apollo11_TV_quality.html contains two pictures that compare a photograph taken from a SSTV display in '69, and the same frame from existing broadcast TV archives. Clearly shows why we want to find the original, unconverted recordings!

That said, I am ready to be disappointed: The news release seems to suggest that all they are releasing is filtered and cleaned up recordings of the broadcast TV - the originals are still lost, and, i greatly fear, have been mislabeled and subsequently destroyed in a 'clean up'.

If you can see the Milky Way then it's worth pondering how other cultures interpreted the sky: The Emu in the Sky http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/AboriginalAstronomy/Examples/emu.htm

Lol they encoded 0.38800000 when the actual value is 0.388481.

Maybe the aliens will figure out that we normally measure time in seconds, and that we converted it to hydrogen spin-flip transition periods just for them. :)

Why is it so hard to measure the pulsar period anyway? You just need to probe its current phase every once in a while in the course of two weeks to get 6 digits. 3 digits means they only looked at it for ~15 minutes with no follow up.

After a few horrendous early bad attempts (Cane Toads for example) Australia's CSIRO (the government's research arm) has gotten very very good at importing biological controls to deal with other invasive species. They now have methodologies in place that let them do so on a regular basis.

Examples include the moth that was used to eradicate Prickly Pear,

About the artice You've linked to: what is worth mentioning here, is that while you can read between the lines that in Australia this "environmental engineering" was in fact successful, for unknown reasons it failed in Kruger National Park, South Africa...
WM