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Funnily enough Australia has been doing this with the Sentinel system with a 10^2m resolution since 2002. Using US-supplied satellites no less. http://www.ga.gov.au/ausgeonews/ausgeonews200906/fire.jsp

Then why can't you adjust the timetable? Instead of an activity starting at 5pm, move it to 4pm. DST is a lie, just to get you up an hour earlier for half the year.

My suggestion, instead of timezones based (approximately) on local midday (like they are now), it should be based on local sunrise (exactly)! That would make the zones and time calculations much more complex but the advantage is automatic DST, since it would adjust the UTC offset by up to a minute each day. Refer to http://www.ga.gov.au/geodesy/astro/sunrise.jsp to see when the "00:00:00" should be. In my "beamtime" I woke at 00:54 (54 minutes after sunrise). The sun set at 11:26, it is currently 16:41 (22:47 GMT+10, by the time I actually post this it will be a few minutes) and daynight will end at 23:58:59 (it's almost spring here so the time between sunrises is shorter than the "usual" 23:59:59; your daynight will almost definitely end at a different beamtime). To see what these are in your local beamtime, you'd probably need a computer of some sort, possibly with GPS data of your location and mine. :)

Though if I was to screw with the time that much, I'd like to make it "metric" at the same time: using seconds, hectoseconds and "manseconds" (see Japanese word for 10,000). So I woke at 0,32,40 and the sun set at 4,11,60 and it is currently 6,00,60 and the daynight will end at 8,63,39 (my current information only goes to the minute, in practice it should be either to the second or rounded to the nearest hs).

All this will guarantee that it will not be adopted anywhere.

You are mistaken. Land in Australia can be held in 'freehold title' which is the highest form of estate in the land and represents full private ownership. See Here for the stats. Much of the land in Australia is Crown leasehold, but it is certainly possible (and common - see Victoria) to own private freehold title.

The CSIRO in Australia has been investigating the practicality of producing electricity from granite deposits since the early nineties. Also since the nineties the same organisation has been saying that Australia could produce all it's power and then some from either solar or wind.

The problem for the last 11yrs in this country has been purely political as we stood stubbornly by the US. Because of this misdirected loyalty our power generation remains 90+% derived from coal and we have seen many innovations payed for by taxpayers sold off to private companies in the EU and elsewhere.

Now that our breadbasket (the Murry-Darling basin) is regularly producing half of what it did just a couple of decades ago people are starting to pay attention.

This was all unknown to me until about ten minutes ago, but I'm pleased to see the Pilbara region of Australia (my country) is one of the oldest places on Earth, stretching back 3.6 billion years (the other's in South Africa).

That's the reason why it is so flat, due to erosion of former mountains.

None of the countries you listed are in the top 50 most arable countries in the world. Of the ones you did list, here are the figures: for the amount of arable land per country:
United States - 19.13 %
Russia - 7.33 %
Australia - 6.55%
Canada - 4.96 %

Here is some leftist scare-mongering "propaganda" about the population vs arable land scarcity documentation, but it does seem to have a list of credible references and appears to be written by a sane organisation/peoples.

Here's some juicy bits:


The combination of FAO data on arable land with UN population estimates for 125 countries with populations of more than 1 million illustrates the decline in per capita arable land between 1960 and 1990. Incorporating UN medium population projections for 2025 suggests an even more rapid decline over the next 30 years, and the acceleration is projected to continue through at least the middle of the next century. The decline can be seen more clearly through the lens of the scarcity benchmark. ...

Until now, arable land scarcity has not been much of a problem. Four countries were experiencing arable land scarcity in the early 1960s: Kuwait, Singapore, Oman and Japan.

Now it's more than 125, with more to come.

I actually come from a farming family. I'm an Australian. We were forced off our farm in the 80s. Google for "salinity", perhaps "pyramid salt" , a government scheme where they turned a previously productive farming area that become a wasteland due to rising watertables, into a fucking SALT MINE. If that doesn't scare the living shit out of you, then you're a moron. As an Australian who lives in one of those "big wide open spaces just waiting to be farmed", I invite you to just try and come here and try and grow any crop at all anywhere in the least-arable half of Australia's land mass. You will find a significant proportion of Australia will not even let you grow so much as a blade of grass.

I am by no means a "greeny leftist", god forbid they actually they actually have the "foresight" to protest about something I actually care about (which would in effect trivialise the issue "oh look, protesters, it must be pointless").

Jesus christwagons. I cannot believe your utter blissfull, utopian ignorance of the shrinking amounts of fertile farmland on this earth. You justify our hilariously unsustainable resource consumption on the premise that Star Trek writers are going to invent an actual protein resequencer?. You've really made me so angry; I've used bold type like 5 times now!! ARRGH!

OPEN LAND IS NOT EQUAL TO FOOD. There are in fact VERY FEW areas in the countries that you mention that are good for farming, for christ's sake. China? It's rapdily turning into a desert. 1.5 million square kilometers is classified as desert, growing at a rate of 1000 sq. km per year. They physically do not have enough farmland to feed themselves and are importing more and more significant amounts of their staple foods just to live.

God... I can't believe you could be so BLIND... just travel somewhere, OK? Have you ever even seen a desert? Or even a farm, in your own country? At all? Christ... imagine trying to grow sorghum in Sibria... I'm going to be angry for hours...

It's really sad when you hear about china making these ambitious pans and really moving forward.
When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me to eat all my food because there were poor kids in china dying of starvation.
Technologically and economically we used to use china as an example of what is wrong with communism. Now china is growing.

1. A space Program
2. A nuclear power program, based on the safest design available.
3. An economy that is growing
4. More land mass
5. and more people.

It is obvious that the grandchildren of todays china will be telling their children to eat all their food because of the poor starving children in America. People will look at America with pity and revulsion. And our country will probably no longer be a superpower (we'll probably be speaking mandarin).
WHY
because.
Like fahrenheit, 451 this country is being torn apart by petty monopolistic groups bent on dominating each other.
If were lucky this might happen.

Maay of you are probably not familiar with Xaraya, but here's the story of where the name came from.

"Project X", as we were calling ourselves in the early days, decided to conduct a name contest among the development team. Entries were submitted, and the voting commenced. Not happy with any of the entries, I decided to come up with something new based of 3 criteria:

• Must start with X. Many of the devs had become collectively fond of this letter for various reasons.
• Must end in A. I thought the product (a CMS) should be female. Most Latin-derived languages identify female words by ending in A.
• Must have three syllables. I considered this the optimal length; nice flow, little chance of getting confused with existing words in most languages, and not too long.

I also felt the name should be a little exotic according to US/European tastes. So, I trolled through a database of Australian place names, entering various short combinations of letters. After a while I had a list of seven possibilities... then I started swapping letters (mostly vowels).

I presented these in IRC, and a couple of them (including Xaraya) caught on. So well, in fact, that the name voting had to be reset to include the new entries. One of our devs who lives in Spain said Xaraya reminded him of the Spanish word for Manta Ray ("raya", literally "blanket"), so I went looking for manta images to create a logo which supported this concept. "Xaraya" won the name contest, and evenually a Manta logo was also adopted.

Of course, this name has nothing to to with what Xaraya does. Making that connection is the realm of the marketing and branding people.