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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, the introducing of African dung beetles to curb an explosion in flies due to agriculture, and the rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus have all been very successful.

And they've introduced no less than 5 different species (3 weevils, 2 flies and a moth) to successfully control Onopordum Thistles (although the program is ongoing).

I think the rule of thumb here is that you don't solve your invasive species problems by just wandering over to their source country, picking up the first highly visible superpredator that you find, and bringing it back. (Cane Toads, Mongooses, Wolves, etc)

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, the introducing of African dung beetles to curb an explosion in flies due to agriculture, and the rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus have all been very successful.

And they've introduced no less than 5 different species (3 weevils, 2 flies and a moth) to successfully control Onopordum Thistles (although the program is ongoing).

I think the rule of thumb here is that you don't solve your invasive species problems by just wandering over to their source country, picking up the first highly visible superpredator that you find, and bringing it back. (Cane Toads, Mongooses, Wolves, etc)

CO2 has caused sea level rise which has been accelerating lately

No, and no.

(Reference links in the same order)

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_few_hundred.html

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html ... and this debunking of one of the major "omg sea level rise!"-sources is an absolute must:

http://www.john-daly.com/deadisle/hobart-msl.htm

CO2 has caused sea level rise which has been accelerating lately

No, and no.

(Reference links in the same order)

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_few_hundred.html

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_last_15.html ... and this debunking of one of the major "omg sea level rise!"-sources is an absolute must:

http://www.john-daly.com/deadisle/hobart-msl.htm

I liked these guys much better when they stuck to making the ultimate desk toy, of science.

"Fires like this are normal."

This is incorrect, fire is normal but this one was not (regardless of the death and destruction). There is a metric called the Fire Danger Index that is used to issue warnings and declare total fire ban days, it is calibrated on the 1939 fires having an index of 100, IIRC the ash wednesday fires that I also witnessed had an index of 70-120. The abnormal conditions for this fire saw the index in the unheard of range of 150-200.

That was not what they were teaching in schools 20 years ago. Oil was supposed to have run out about 1997 or 1998 and tin 1990ish.

Regardless of what you were taught in school 20 years ago, that's not what the actual Limits to Growth report said. There was a lot of bogus information propagated about the Limits to Growth report at the time it came out, largely by people who didn't like what it actually had to say. The reality is that the Limits to Growth report explored a number of different possible scenarios (varying assumptions such as the impact of technological change and of social policies), and found that most (but not all) scenarios seem to lead to some kind of "overshoot and collapse" in the mid to late 21st century. These were never meant to be precise predictions, but rather to provide some idea of the global system's behavioral tendencies. Interestingly, a recent study has found that the Limits to Growth "standard run" scenario tracks quite well with the actual observed behavior of the world over the last 30 years. As the abstract of that report says:

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. This paper focuses on a comparison of recently collated historical data for 1970-2000 with scenarios presented in the Limits to Growth. The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares 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. The data does not compare well with other scenarios involving comprehensive use of technology or stabilizing behaviour and policies.

Electric motors should easily be able to reach 90% efficiency, with the record being 98% efficiency.

If only that were the whole story. How efficient is the generation of the electricity from hydrocarbon/nuclear sources? How efficient is the transfer between mains and battery?

Very possibly more than the IC engine's 20%, but surely nowhere near the figure you claim possible - if only theoretically - for electric motors. Generation faces the same problem as the engine - the raw energy output is heat, not electricity, and the efficiencies are lost in the conversion.

In their favour, an electric motor is much more energy efficient than an internal combustion engine. 20% seems to be the maximum for a practical internal combustion engine. Electric motors should easily be able to reach 90% efficiency, with the record being 98% efficiency. Thus that 4.5 litres of petrol (1.2 US gallons of gas) becomes 20 litres. Not too bad for a first attempt, given that a small car (eg. Toyoto Echo/Yaris) typically takes 30-35 litres of petrol on a fill.

Yaris and their ilk aren't the model of efficiency in their design. Surely it wouldn't be too hard to make a Yaris type car use 35% less energy, resulting in a capacitor powered electric car with similar range to a petrol equivalent?

I visited Parkes when I went to Australia a few years ago. They had a neat display at the visitor's centre about The Dish, with pictures, and a writeup about, as they put it, Things That Really Happened and Things That Made a Good Story. I stayed a couple of days in Forbes NSW, the town that played Parkes in the movie. Parkes has long since turned in to strip mall hell, but with the right camera angles, parts of Forbes can pass for the late 1960s.

The (real) Parkes people did a nice writeup on their involvement with Apollo 11.

And it's still in the middle of a sheep paddock.

...laura

If you really want to know... http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/ Nathan

There also is or rather was the the Cooperative Research Centre for Satellite Systems who were responsible for the FedSat. However this group was shut down in 2005 after its funding was cut.

From the wiki:
This warms the air near the ground, and this air is prevented from rising and flowing away. This can be demonstrated by opening a small window near the roof of a greenhouse: the temperature drops considerably.

Now. If we add carbon particles to the atmosphere, it acts to trap the heat reflected off the planet.

Now, be convinced that man is contributing to the warming of the planet by adding carbon to the atmosphere at an alarming rate.

In short:
1) Stop hijacking threads.
2) Open your eyes to man's influence on the climate.
3) Accept that we are screwing the earth, not some "magical background radiation".
4) Take steps to reduce YOUR impact. Recycle, use clean energy, be selective with your purchases.

Don't really know, just did a bit of basic Googling and found the following references.

Engadget's report of the 2006 ruling says:

Considering their recent victory, CSIRO's pending cases against Intel, Dell, Microsoft, HP, and Netgear definitely have roots now, and if judges continue to rule in the Aussies' favor, the big boys could be shelling out "hundreds of millions of dollars" in back pay to cover their wrongs.

This suggests that the CSIRO already has cases pending against various manufacturers, and the Buffalo ruling added some legitimacy.

But, a CSIRO press release regarding the 2006 ruling says:

The court has said that patent cases brought against CSIRO by Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Netgear should be transferred to the court which is already familiar with the CSIRO patent infringement case in the Eastern District of Texas.

So apparently the CSIRO may have been on the receiving end of legal action from those companies, not the initiator of it:

[CSIRO Chief Executive] Dr Garrett said that the California cases started in May 2005 because Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Netgear sued CSIRO, asking the court to declare that their products did not infringe CSIRO's US WLAN patent and that CSIRO's patent was invalid.

I'm not sure whether CSIROs action against Buffalo was taken before or after the MSFT/Intel/Dell/HP/Netgear attempt. But I guess they're hoping the Buffalo case will give their claims some strong legal legitimacy which they can then use in the larger case.

Where did you get that idea?

Australia has never recorded a case of BSE or vCJD and is one of a handful of countries recognised as having a negligible BSE risk by the World Organisation for Animal Health.

The movie plot remark reminded me of a comment by a scientists on TV the other day, he said something like: This report reads like a horror story. For the non-Aussies, the Murry Darling Basin is Australia's bread basket, it covers a large portion of the SE quarter of the continent and according to the most respected scientific body in Australia, it is dying. We are the world's fourth largest exporter of grain but since 1998 there has been only one bumper crop, most years have been down by 40-60%.

The main problem is that the water has been over-used and mismanaged but the region is also becoming drier and they have found that a 10% drop in rainfall converts to a 30% drop in run-off (ie: 30% less water in the system). We have had some periods of good rain but mainly it has been either in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or all at once (as in record breaking floods), many places have now been in severe drought for over a decade. Looking at the news about California it seems to be having similar problems with "fire and water" but that's just the impression I get from news reports. Water rationing is the norm now in Australia's major cities.

Not that I agree with the GP's musings but all wars are resource wars.

"Disposal" isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be; reprocessing reduces the amount of waste produced tremendously, and storing a little waste for a time is a whole lot better than *not* storing it and dumping it into the atmosphere, as we're doing with coal.

The French, who have come the farthest in reprocessing, are finding out it's not as simple to reprocess as many would have you believe. IEEE's magazine "Spectrum" has a good article on this: "Nuclear Wasteland". However another /.er brought up the Candu reactor in Canada a few weeks ago. I don't know much about it so I can't say whether there are any problems with the design or waste, or whether its economically feasible. However nuclear power isn't really needed, not in the US. The Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to supply the 48 continuous states with electricity. Add OR, CA, AZ, NM, and Texas along with some offshore sites from Cape Cod to the Mid Atlantic and much more can be generated by wind. Also many megawatts of potential power goes up smoke stacks daily as Waste Heat. Combining wind, solar power, cogeneration or waste heat recovery and conservation negates the need for nuclear power. The alternative power sources, both listed above and others, have a distinct advantage over nuclear power, while it can take years and years for a nuclear power plant to be constructed and brought online, these others can be added immediately. Wind generators and solar PVs can be made from raw material and brought online in months, and can be sited closer to many of the placed where the energy is needed. Besides PVs on roofs a farmer in the Adirondack Mountains in New York can provide electricity to NYC. The farmer would then have a second source of income.

It seems to me that it would be worth the trouble to mechanize startup so that each step is isolated from all the others and knows which previous step it's dependent on and waits for only that step, while everything else cruises ahead in parallel.

There is work being done on this already. I can't remember specific links right now (googling turns up some interesting links), but I remember I first heard about it on Planet Debian, an RSS feed collector for Debian developer's blogs; I've found some very interesting things by browsing by there every once and a while. See also init-ng.

All of this trouble, and all we seem to have gotten from it is a picture of the Earth (telescope pointed at a giant space mirror?) and a picture of one of the telescopes themselves (don't know how they got that one).

All of this trouble, and all we seem to have gotten from it is a picture of the Earth (telescope pointed at a giant space mirror?) and a picture of one of the telescopes themselves (don't know how they got that one).

The reporting in the two articles looks pretty good. For that matter it even looks like the science behind the reports is pretty good.

Reading the press releases at CSIRO, it looks like the marketers for the organization are trying to establishes a connection to global warming politics (probably in an effort to get funding). The article I linked to says:

"research that will help them explain more accurately how the ocean governs global climate."

I am going to walk out on a limb here and reject the premise that purpose of the supergyre is to govern global climate. I will actually venture the statement that the supergyre really doesn't have a purpose in life, it is just the result of natural forces such as the spinning of the earth and the absorbing the energy of the sun, etc..

Well let's ignore the "i.e." that I don't think Torvalds actually spelled out and read what this really is saying...

Well, surely if your making a distinction between roundness and sphericality then the Earth is the least round object on Earth, being the biggest (since curvature is inversely proportional to radius).

Your supposedly is provably incorrect: from TFA (actually this one is better) they are making 93 mm diameter spheres, and CSIRO's (who are behind this story, and have previous experience in ultra high precision production) process can produce spheres with a deviation from spherical of as little as 35 nm.

The mean radius of Earth is 6372.797 km, hence mean diameter of 12745.594 km. This is 137,049,397 times greater than the diameter of the sphere they are making.

Scaling their deviation of 35 nm up by 137,049,397 times gives a proportional deviation of 4.797 metres.

Everest dwarfs this at 8848 metres.

Even the Dead Sea with a surface elevation of -418 metres, a max depth of 330m (therefore lowest basin elevation of -748 metres) dwarfs it by any reasonable measure.

Going in the other direction, scaling Everest down gives about 65 microns. This is just not a challenging accuracy to modern engineering.

Well, surely if your making a distinction between roundness and sphericality then the Earth is the least round object on Earth, being the biggest (since curvature is inversely proportional to radius).

Your supposedly is provably incorrect: from TFA (actually this one is better) they are making 93 mm diameter spheres, and CSIRO's (who are behind this story, and have previous experience in ultra high precision production) process can produce spheres with a deviation from spherical of as little as 35 nm.

The mean radius of Earth is 6372.797 km, hence mean diameter of 12745.594 km. This is 137,049,397 times greater than the diameter of the sphere they are making.

Scaling their deviation of 35 nm up by 137,049,397 times gives a proportional deviation of 4.797 metres.

Everest dwarfs this at 8848 metres.

Even the Dead Sea with a surface elevation of -418 metres, a max depth of 330m (therefore lowest basin elevation of -748 metres) dwarfs it by any reasonable measure.

Going in the other direction, scaling Everest down gives about 65 microns. This is just not a challenging accuracy to modern engineering.

It's important enough for laboratories in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Australia and USA to invest a great deal of time and effort.

The spheres are being made by CSIRO's Centre for Precision Optics. They've been making precision spheres for research since the late '80s, and have all the recognition they need from anyone who has a clue.

Have a look here; http://www.tip.csiro.au/IMP/Optical/spheres.htm. It might help you understand the project better.

As an Australian, I should point out here that we're not in "1-in-1000 year" drought. Point in fact, there was a feature in the Australian today about this. The second-wettest year on record in Australia was 2000.

The problem isn't lack of rainfall. The problem is that rainfall patterns have shifted - it no longer rains as much as it used to in certain areas, and it now rains more than it used to. In particular, this is screwing up dams - most of the catchment areas for them are now getting less rainfall. This is stuffing up irrigation, which makes the farmers pissed off because they ignored the fact that we live in a sunburnt country and don't plant to suit the prevailing conditions.

In this land of droughts and flooding rains, we have farmers who plant crops and raise livestock requiring intensive irrigation. According to the CSIRO it takes about 750 litres of water to grow one kilogram of oven-dry wheat grain. It also takes up to 100,000 litres of water to produce just one kilogram of beef, and 170,000 litres of water to produce 1 kg of clean wool. Something like 75% of all water utilisation in Australia is by farmers - about 10% of water is used in cities groaning under Level 4 water restrictions, with the remaining 15% used by heavy industry. A lot of this water "goes overseas" in a way.

What Australia needs is a way of shifting water around more efficiently, to take it from the areas which have too much and direct it to the places it's needed. Initiatives like Beattie's "water grid" will help. Moving the users of water would help, too - most of Australia's agriculture is based around the Murray-Darling basin, which has been hit hard by the drought. Areas like northern Australia and Tasmania, by contrast, are under-developed agriculturally and have plenty of water.

A technology will have a very hard time being standardized if someone holds the patent. However, in this case and others, nobody realized the patent issue when it was being pushed as a standard. Many years later, when everyone is using it, the patent holder comes out and claims the ownership and starts to collect payments. It's too late to correct the mistake. If the patent holder had been saying so from the beginning, it would not have had a chance to grow such a market value.

I think there should be some laws to restrict such a practice.

That is not what happened in this case. The patent holder was "holding back" in this case because they had no option. It was an Australian patent against a US corporation. Now that the FTA is in force, this has opened the opportunity not only for the Australian patent holder to enforce their patent in the US, but also for the US corporation to challenge the Australian patent in court. Guess what? The greedy US corportation challenged the CSIRO, an honorable scientific research entity, in court to have their patent invalidated. So naturally, as is required to retain a patent, the CSIRO had to defend their patent to keep it.

The CSIRO are good people. They do lots of good things for the good of not just Australia, but the World.

This court case was brought against them, the CSIRO, in an attempt to invalidate their rightful patent. If you do not defend your patent, you lose it.

So here we have a case where a money motivated corporation is trying to stomp on a scientific research entity (which only strives to further the state of the art), so that the corportation can make more money. Thankfully the scientific research entity came out on top.

There is patent abuse in this story, but it most certainly is NOT from the CSIRO. Thankfully that abuse failed.

A technology will have a very hard time being standardized if someone holds the patent. However, in this case and others, nobody realized the patent issue when it was being pushed as a standard. Many years later, when everyone is using it, the patent holder comes out and claims the ownership and starts to collect payments. It's too late to correct the mistake. If the patent holder had been saying so from the beginning, it would not have had a chance to grow such a market value.

I think there should be some laws to restrict such a practice.

That is not what happened in this case. The patent holder was "holding back" in this case because they had no option. It was an Australian patent against a US corporation. Now that the FTA is in force, this has opened the opportunity not only for the Australian patent holder to enforce their patent in the US, but also for the US corporation to challenge the Australian patent in court. Guess what? The greedy US corportation challenged the CSIRO, an honorable scientific research entity, in court to have their patent invalidated. So naturally, as is required to retain a patent, the CSIRO had to defend their patent to keep it.

The CSIRO are good people. They do lots of good things for the good of not just Australia, but the World.

This court case was brought against them, the CSIRO, in an attempt to invalidate their rightful patent. If you do not defend your patent, you lose it.

So here we have a case where a money motivated corporation is trying to stomp on a scientific research entity (which only strives to further the state of the art), so that the corportation can make more money. Thankfully the scientific research entity came out on top.

There is patent abuse in this story, but it most certainly is NOT from the CSIRO. Thankfully that abuse failed.

According to CSIRO they have been selling licences to companies it's just an issue now because it's now that this "Buffalo Technology" company has decided it doesn't want to pay.

"Seeing as the charter of the CSIRO is to produce research which exclusively benefits Australian business"

Where does it mention the word or imply exclusivity in their charter ?

http://www.csiro.au/csiro/content/standard/psod,,. html

+5 insightful.. damn moderators are all trolls as well...

You just provided me with our internal newsletter's quote of the week. Thank you!

*Note for International media: CSIRO is the national research agency of the Australian Government. It undertakes scientific research for the purpose of assisting Australian industry, furthering the interests of the Australian community and contributing to the achievement of national objectives.

There's also a tambourine version (from the same research group): http://www.csiro.au/csiro/content/file/pfka,,.html The video looks more realistic than the air-guitar one imo.

That got modded insightful?

Heck, this whole discussion has gotten off to a bad start. Maybe it's the video that did it; too many people are seeing this as a gimmick or even a fake, just because 'it doesn't look right'. The ABC's coverage does a better job than the SMH, methinks, and of course there's the CSIRO's own release.

This shirt is real. The idea is to get people interested in the idea of this sort of wearable technology. There are more practical applications being put forward by the team behind it. That's not to say they're not going to try and market this one, though.

When's the last time you heard of a bug in Linux forcing a reinstall?

Hey Bright Boy, you must not pay attention to Linux news nor how many different distributions there are. Allow me to enlighten you a bit.

Mandrake 9.2 may kill LG CD-ROM drives | Fedora Core 6 release date pushed back | Kernel Newsflash (Do a quick search for this section of the page and the old production kernels) | ReiserFS and filesystem corruption issues -- how to fix them, etc (Has to do with an old known issue between Gentoo and ReiserFS | ext3 corruption issue in 2.6.18 found by RedHat

Also try running something like Rawhide, Gentoo unstable branch (Which I do), Debian unstable, or any plethora of other systems out there which include software that's not extensively tested. While it is true that it is rare to find incredible bugs that create a big headache for end-users in a Linux distribution release, it's not impossible and there have been many occurrences of these bugs in release Linux kernels themselves. Let's not kid ourselves, shit happens on both sides of the fence, and it's not only unfair but naive to hold Microsoft to some golden standard because they have a large bankroll. Throwing money at a problem is the worst way to solve it, especially when it comes to QA.

P.S. -- Even in the stable branches of distros breakage can happen and it can be difficult or impossible to recover vital data from the system. I'm running reiser4 on my ~amd64 Gentoo and I keep hoping I don't end up with filesystem corruption that would hit me quite often in the past when I was pretty much forced to use a vanilla kernel with reiser4 or the -mm patchset, which is about as unstable as they come. Plenty of other people get hit by random difficult to reproduce bugs for any filesystem, daily. ext3, jfs, xfs, reiserfs, you name it. I dunno about ext2 though, but since they're so closely related (ext2/3), I'd figure most things that ail one ail the other. Also, you were speaking directly on a bug forcing a reinstall of the system, which usually means a gross configuration error or some other form of data loss. The Mandrake link is the only one which diverts from this train of thought, but it most certainly was a big hitter if you can remember when the story hit, as I do.

Another P.S. -- You say they've had all this time to iron Vista out as if they started out with "This is what Vista is going to be, period. Get there and release it." Sorry buddy, that's not how development goes, especially when competitors are around introducing new ideas all the time, never mind your own R&D department.

"Sometimes splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen by using sunlight energy is also referred to as artificial photosynthesis."

http://www.csiro.au/promos/ozadvances/Series14Arti fical.htm

http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr09090 3.htm

http://www.climateark.org/articles/2000/4th/rework to.htm

Mondoarchive works pretty well for backing up a Linux system. It uses your existing kernel and other various OS parts to make a bootable set of backup disks (via Mindi Linux), which you can use to restore your partitions and files in the event of a crash.

Yes, WarGames took some dramatic license. But except for the silly talking computer, it wasn't all that bad, particularly considering when it was made. I always wondered where the money came from to buy all the fancy computer gear, considering that it was (in 1983) worth about the same as a nice used car.

I'm reminded of the display at Parkes about The Dish, where they talk about the things that really happened, and the things that made a good story.

There is a line between dramatic license and badness. Personally, I don't think WarGames crossed that line.

...laura

I know the parent post asks for labs in the USA, but there are plenty of options overseas - notably the government-funded CSIRO laboratories all around sunny Australia (disclaimer: that's where I work)*. If you are interested in computer science research, you can't go past the ICT Centre (/.). Specifically, if you're interested in cutting-edge robotics research, there's Autonomous Systems (who are frequent news items on ./), or if medical engineering is more your style, there's the BioMedIA lab. There are, of course, other research labs in Australia, but this is the one I know most about :)

Australia offers a good place to carry out research, with many state governments (notably Victoria and Queensland) pouring millions into funding. Plus the lifestyle and standard of living is pretty hard to beat :D

* The usual oddities that associated with any large organisation (management & HR weirdness) are omnipresent, but these come and go and are par for the course.

I know the parent post asks for labs in the USA, but there are plenty of options overseas - notably the government-funded CSIRO laboratories all around sunny Australia (disclaimer: that's where I work)*. If you are interested in computer science research, you can't go past the ICT Centre (/.). Specifically, if you're interested in cutting-edge robotics research, there's Autonomous Systems (who are frequent news items on ./), or if medical engineering is more your style, there's the BioMedIA lab. There are, of course, other research labs in Australia, but this is the one I know most about :)

Australia offers a good place to carry out research, with many state governments (notably Victoria and Queensland) pouring millions into funding. Plus the lifestyle and standard of living is pretty hard to beat :D

* The usual oddities that associated with any large organisation (management & HR weirdness) are omnipresent, but these come and go and are par for the course.

I know the parent post asks for labs in the USA, but there are plenty of options overseas - notably the government-funded CSIRO laboratories all around sunny Australia (disclaimer: that's where I work)*. If you are interested in computer science research, you can't go past the ICT Centre (/.). Specifically, if you're interested in cutting-edge robotics research, there's Autonomous Systems (who are frequent news items on ./), or if medical engineering is more your style, there's the BioMedIA lab. There are, of course, other research labs in Australia, but this is the one I know most about :)

Australia offers a good place to carry out research, with many state governments (notably Victoria and Queensland) pouring millions into funding. Plus the lifestyle and standard of living is pretty hard to beat :D

* The usual oddities that associated with any large organisation (management & HR weirdness) are omnipresent, but these come and go and are par for the course.

I know the parent post asks for labs in the USA, but there are plenty of options overseas - notably the government-funded CSIRO laboratories all around sunny Australia (disclaimer: that's where I work)*. If you are interested in computer science research, you can't go past the ICT Centre (/.). Specifically, if you're interested in cutting-edge robotics research, there's Autonomous Systems (who are frequent news items on ./), or if medical engineering is more your style, there's the BioMedIA lab. There are, of course, other research labs in Australia, but this is the one I know most about :)

Australia offers a good place to carry out research, with many state governments (notably Victoria and Queensland) pouring millions into funding. Plus the lifestyle and standard of living is pretty hard to beat :D

* The usual oddities that associated with any large organisation (management & HR weirdness) are omnipresent, but these come and go and are par for the course.

here. "Three tracking stations were receiving the signals simultaneously. They were CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope, the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station outside Canberra, and NASA's Goldstone station in California."

"During the first few minutes of the broadcast, NASA alternated between the signals from its two stations at Goldstone and Honeysuckle Creek, searching for the best quality images. When they switched to the Parkes pictures, they were of such superior quality, that NASA remained with the Parkes TV pictures for the remainder of the 21/2-hour telecast."

There was no power failure, it was high winds. I wasn't alive at the time, but I do know a little bit of the history of Parkes (i was born 30km south of there, and spent the first 18 years of my life in the region).

And it doesnt look look aussies who lost the tapes, the national archives in the US appear to have lost them.

The Dish was a fun movie, and the Parkes Observatory folks are happy with the publicity it got them.

The Dish is also a work of fiction (though a delightful one). The real story is available and makes a fascinating read.

The Visitor's Centre at Parkes has the replica control console they made for The Dish on display. The real one had long since been upgraded. I've been there: it's a short drive north of Parkes, NSW. A town of strip malls and fast food: the exterior shots in The Dish were done in Forbes, the next town down the highway.

The bit in the film about getting the Moon's coordinates wrong because they weren't in the nothern hemisphere really happened. They also had a major technical problem at a bad time, but it was a blown-up television scan converter.

And, yes, it's still in the middle of a sheep paddock...

...laura

• U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM); Computer simulation of current currents with counterclockwise swirl NW of SW tip of Australia.
• WA ocean movies, 1993-2000
• The Leeuwin Current - life of the west

However, the "death trap" viewpoint is somewhat different from this one:

"The canyon begins at a depth of 50 metres and falls to 5,000, making it one of the worlds largest submarine canyons. It is a fascinating area that annually attracts pygmy blue whales, drawn by an abundance of krill. During summer, as many as 20 whales may be found at one time at this site. The whales eat up to 10 tonnes of krill a day and we want to find out whether there is a correlation between the presence of the canyon and the physical oceanography and the biological productivity of krill."

That yellow dot/circle in the middle on the the left panel is Perth, Rottnest island is just a scosh to the left, so Rottnest canyon cant be too far.

The Leeuwin Current is a permanent feature of Western Australia's waters and reaches it's peak in the autumn and winter (so it is at its peak now).

From the linked article "The Leeuwin Current rarely flows around the eastern side of Rottnest, but it frequently bathes the western and southwestern sides, influencing the flora and fauna there. Sea temperatures in those regions in winter are several degrees higher than against the mainland coast."

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MoneyGuzz lerInc
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlu gins
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndNon freeOnSameMachine
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggre gation
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWi thGPL
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModule License
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugin sInNF

I think this item is also insightful:

http://www.tux.org/lkml/#s1-19

which mentions:
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rgooch/linux/docs/ licensing.txt

TECHNICALLY, seems the GPL prohibits what Kororaa is doing with their Live CD. HOWEVER, seems Linus would side with them. HOWEVER HOWEVER, this would have to be legally debated, in other words, "defended". There's no explicit legal protection, and to get a judgment call would require money, lawyers, and being tangled in a lawsuit.

All of which would be silly and embarrassing both inside, and outside, of The Community.

I, personally, am very much in favor of "completely free (as in speech)" software. Mr. Stallman may be a "stickler", but I find him heroically inflexible. The world needs MORE Mr. Stallmans who actually and honestly stand tall, stand proud for what they believe in. And I'm not kissing ass here: I share his vision, but am far weaker in my convictions.

The pragmatist in me thinks that the Linux kernel's license should be changed to the LGPL. (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html) I know full well, however, that this would be a huge step backward for Freedom. (Anybody saying otherwise is either [1.a] simply not intelligent enough to understand, or [1.b] hasn't bothered to consider the implications, [2] has ulterior motives, and/or [3] has a personal vendetta against RMS due to personality conflict. "Consider the messenger...")

But PRACTICALLY, it would enable real headway on the driver/support front. I think ATI and nVidia (and every other closed-source **DRIVER** maker) is quite daft. But they have their "reasons", even if we neither know, nor understand them.

It's laudable to DREAM of a world where all software is Free, both as in Speech AND as in Beer. Bur for now, and for the foreseeable future, we all live and work in the Real World. Unless we're friendly and play nice with the other children, most proprietary companies, especially hardware creators, may very well choose to take their balls and go home. (To those who cry, "GOOD RIDDANCE!", I ask for you to tell us all of the open-source-hardware, with accompanying open-source drivers, to replace their wares with!) Free and Open (Source) Software makes its virtues self-evident. We need not be antagonistic.

The truth of the matter is that the hardware we want open-sourced drivers for the most is made by companies comfortably at the top of their game. They sell PLENTY of hardware to not need to worry/care about The Community one iota. They ha

Er, regarding possible Global Warming, one of the other responses to the GP (my post) pointed out this links:

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/greenhouse_2 000e.htm

which discusses volcanic effects on climate.

The link says this:

"Gaseous emissions

Volcanoes are also sources of water vapour and carbon dioxide, but their contribution to the global budgets of greenhouse gases is very small. On the time-scale of decades to centuries, greenhouse gas emissions from volcanic sources cause negligible climate change.

However, volcanic emissions of gases such as sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and hydrogen fluoride are important compared to human-induced sources. These gases have effects on climate (cooling), on stratospheric ozone and possibly on global cloudiness."

So, it specifically mentions that volcanoes have little effect on possible global warming; in fact they should have a cooling effect.

The wikipedia link -you- specifically mention talks about 'Long Term' changes on a matter of a few months or years, including red sunsets (from crap in the air) and cooling (again, from crap in the air). It doesn't say a damned thing about greenhouse gases, so your link doesn't support your argument.

I'm not sure humans are yet capable of producing the quantities of pollutants necessary to create significant changes in the earths' climate. With reports like this http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/greenhouse_2 000e.htm and others like it (I recall reading somewhere that, globally, volcanic eruptions during a more active year can expel more pollutants than the human race has since we discovered fire..can't find the quote/report dangit) along with a realisation of what an enormously large system we're talking about, and the enormous amount of "inertia" to be overcome making any significant change to such a system, I have a feeling we may be giving ourselves too much credit, that we may not be able to significantly change climate patterns even if we tried.

Though I am not on the side of Global Warming I do not think we should shy away from doing everything we can to limit what we produce as pollution.

More importantly our denuding the planet of trees is more of a threat than if we rolled back pollution controls to 1960s levels on cars and factories. As I am searching now I do not have the citing but if we remove all that is green from the surface of the earth we will just barely survive the lowered oxygen in the atmosphere as a result. If we leave all the trees and make every square inch of the land greenery but destroy all the plankton and other similar plants in the sea the world will die. In both these cases our actions as an industrial world affect our quality of life and global warming more than the actual pollutants in the air other than how the pollutants affect the plants.

More than anything else we need to stop the destruction of the Rain Forests, put extremely severe restrictions on dumping stuff in the ocean and make the penalties harsh enough as well as enforced enough to put these companies out of business and make it more profitable to be clean than pollute. Mother Earth will forgive only so much and she may not be warming up but she sure as well is having a hell of a time breathing.


Drive through Lizbeth NJ any workday in the week and breathe deeply. Then go to the top of the Appalachian mountains and breathe deeply. Notice the difference.

Global Warming is not the problem. Loss of greenery and oxygen creating plants is.



No Room in Sig for this - Sig Addendum - Impeach Bush