Slashdot Mirror

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/b...

Actually, now that you mention it, there has been a lot of publicity over crime by large gatherings of South Sudanese refugee youths.
Not nearly as bad as the refugee sex assaults in Europe, but still very scary .
They use social media to organise. That fear could be used to drive public acceptance for the laws.

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/b...
https://www.google.com.au/sear...

Australia has stopped building new coal plants.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/bl...

Housing in Australia has several components to it which I will try to cover in this post. I live in Melbourne Australia and I want to provide insight to people interested in learning more. 1. The 1980s Hawke/Keating Market reforms set the country up for the past 30 years of economic growth. Anyone denying that is crazy. They floated the currency, freed up the market for global trade and set the nation on a path to long term wealth. They did however over stamp on the breaks in 1991 causing a short recession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 2. Negative Gearing and the Capital Gains Tax concessions are two massive tax breaks for existing home owners. Their effects are huge and not to be underestimated. Negative gearing allows any loss on a property such as repair work or investment loss to be written off against the owner's taxable income. Originally it was introduced to boost investment in the housing market. The Capital gains discount allows a property owner to not pay tax on 50% of their profit on a property when they sell it. In the current market this has created a situation where it is better to leave a property empty, appreciating in value and then sell it without the hassle of dealing with tenants and property management firms. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... 3. Foreign investment. Market research data from Vancouver shows that implementing a 15% tax on foreign property investment caused a property price drop of around 20%. Where that money is coming from doesn't really matter, the point is that foreign investment accounts for approximately 8-11% of properties purchased in the market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news... 4. Recent studies of water usage in Melbourne and Sydney show that upto 80,000 properties in Melbourne alone lie vacant. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ne... and http://www.afr.com/real-estate... 5. Immigration, 182,000 people migrated to Australia in 2015-16 the 2016-17 stats are not available http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats... This is a large number by Australian standards, but most immigrants are not rich enough to buy property outright. Mostly they increase competition in the rental market. Most of these people are settling in Sydney and Melbourne with an estimate of 70-80% of people moving to these two cities. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... 6. The mining/resources boom. In the late 1990s/early 2000s the mining/resources boom brought a ton of wealth into Australia, this prevented a natural correction from occurring in the property market. More money flooded into the market which has helped to inflate prices and keep the cycle going. Now, with all of these factors combining there are many things occurring in the domestic market. Yes the car industry is closing, but overall that's not a big deal so far, because we haven't been exporting many cars for years and it's been a government funded jobs program. Wages are stagnant and growth is quite low at the moment, at the same time we have seen layoffs increasing especially in the mineral states such as Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. The biggest threat to the economy in my opinion is high house prices growth at a time of high unemployment growth. We are seeing areas which most people would not consider desirable to purchase housing in (traditionally poverty stricken high crime areas)

What an unscrupulous being:

Also in March 2015, the parents of a young child suffering from brain cancer, whom Gibson had befriended, came forward to report that they had been unaware that Gibson had earlier been claiming to be fundraising for their child's treatment on their behalf. The family stated they had not known about Gibson's claim to be charity fundraising on behalf of the child, and the family had never received any funds from her or TheWholePantry. The family suspected Gibson had been using information gleaned from the family's experiences to underpin her own claims to having brain cancer.

source, source 2

Maybe if you spent 5 years being tortured and as a result cannot raise your arms above your chest from the damage done without pain, you wouldn't use a computer too much, either.

The net effects are significantly undesirable -- accounting for both desirable and undesirable outcomes.

I don't agree that that has been shown, but I agree that is what is being *asserted*. I've seen no metric of enumeration for desirable and undesirable outcomes, nor is there any historical argument to show for example, that our world in 2014 (approximately 0.8C warmer than 1914) is less desirable than the world in 1914. Of course I'm sure technology serves as a great confounder there, but then, so could it be in the future as well.

The count is twenty-eight now for the low climate answers, but it now stands at one for the "constellation" question:

Do you admit that there are peer reviewed papers, supporting the idea of AGW/CAGW, that predict the *opposite* of each other, so that when either observation is made, instead of AGW/CAGW being falsified, we simply assert that the falsified prediction was not in fact necessary to AGW/CAGW?

Example of AGW/CAGW predictions that are apparently not part of the falsifiability criteria: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ne...

Note that if any of the predictions in question were to come true, it would've been claimed as a validation of AGW/CAGW - but notice how these hollow predictions, once failed, don't touch the central conceit in question?

Hamas isn't saying that. They are still committed to the destruction of Israel, and they control Gaza. Fatah is willing to say that in English when speaking to the West or where the West can hear, but when speaking in Arabic to their own they aren't so peaceful either.

Israel may pay for tolerance it shows to killers
The Palestinians Want Peace — Just Not With a Jewish State

Companies need a system to decide who gets retrenched first due to automation improvements: Those who use self-scanners at supermarkets get laid off first. It's only fair! :-)

But how will these newly unemployed cope? :-(

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135284/How-cheating-checkouts-turning-nation-self-service-shoplifters.html
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/coles-to-combat-selfserve-thieves/story-fni0dcne-1226746394342

Problem solved! :-)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/big-y-self-checkout-machines_n_980886.html
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/06/are-self-service-checkouts-on-the-way-out/

A power plant is supposedly a controlled environment, and the people there certainly thought they knew what they were doing...

Yeah, like maintaining their equipment regularly, am I right? ;-)

So-called "Fair Work Australia" the Australian Labor government's workplace commission declare that using your employer's facilities during work hours to distribute pornography to fellow employees is not a sackable offence.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/sending-porn-emails-at-work-no-longer-a-sackable-offence-fair-work-commission-rules/story-fni0fit3-1226710444957
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-04/porn-emails-at-work-not-automatic-sacking-offence/4933426
http://www.smh.com.au/national/public-service/porn-not-an-automatic-sacking-offence-tribunal-20130903-2t3ki.html

Three Victorian postal workers were dismissed after using the Australia Post email system to distribute sexually explicit material in their Dandenong workplace. They appealed, and the full bench of the Fair Work Commission - in a non-unanimous judgement - found the terminations were harsh and the workers could be reinstated. Two of the three commissioners said in a statement: "There is an emerging trend... regarding the accessing, sending or receiving and storing pornography by an employee as a form of serious misconduct that invariably merits termination of employment."

these guys can do something about it.

What is best? Stay in home and hoping that no bored neighbourn will kill you, or actually go out, make mistakes, and, guess what, be a human being? A Man? But not THE man of course.

Offtopic, I know. But this is just to show that travelling to some parts of the world isn't as safe from bored neighbourhood kids as one would like to believe

Thankfully, TFA has a link to another, far more interesting, FA:

Gotta hand it to the Herald-Sun. They don't get distracted by irrelevant minutiae such as digital forensics. They cut to the chase!

The linked article is far more about the internal 'robot' and very little about the beer fridge. While perhaps the intent of the /. post, I was far more interested in how the beer fridge could have caused such an issue. Thankfully, TFA has a link to another, far more interesting, FA:

Telstra engineers say any electric spark of a large enough magnitude can generate radio frequency noise that is wide enough to create blackouts on the 850mHz spectrum that carries our mobile voice calls and internet data.

Engineers said the motor in the beer fridge was causing the interference.

It includes an image of said fridge, which looks like something from the 50s/60s (maybe? I don't know, I still have people yelling at me to get off their lawns.) More modern models probably have much better, efficient motors that don't cause this kind of issue.

Mr Halley said Telstra was increasing its black-spot detectors as Australians flocked to smartphones, and the rapid expansion of services revealed some very odd "ghosts in the machine". [...] These included faulty automatic teller machines, lights and illegal phone and TV antenna boosters.

No mention of the resolution, but I assume it involved unplugging the fridge. (I wouldn't be surprised if he paid more in electricity for that thing per year than just buying a new, medium-sized fridge.)

You really should start your medication, boy. Then read the fucking article, which says this is common and expected behavior. Of course, if it had been anything but the Register it wouldn't be blowing it so much out of proportion. Here are a few better links to the same story, by less disreputable sources:

New York Daily News
Atlantic Wire
Herald Sun (Australia)
Huffington Post
Slate (Slate credits BoingBoing)

Google News is full of them. There was one story by a business blog that questioned its authenticity on Google's list of stories from the search term "Ukraine dolphins"

Nice trick there, telling us the cost based on your "wage" - which to us is an arbitrary number.

For me, it's very concrete, believe me, but you don't expect to make public my payslip on /., do you? (all I can say, I'm not paid to the top of the industry, I enjoy a quiet life now).

How many monthly electricity payments did it cost you? How long before it pays for itself?

My estimations for the time to total RoI: between 5 and 6 years at the current rates on energy. But they do have a nasty habit to increase year after year in Australia so it may be shorter.
(they say that's because of network maintenance: I reckon their insurance premiums went up)

It really doesn't help your case when the leader of your own country has named your actions as criminal before your day in court. However, if that does happen you can always sue for defamation.

Assange's best bet right now is for Gillard to be dumped by the ALP or voted out in 2013.

Not when the US Government and others are providing the funding for those communication devices.

My apologises for CNNing the word 'invasion'. They've surrounded and entered the building: UPDATE 11:15AM (AEST): REPORTS suggest more British police have been seen entering the Ecuadorian embassy where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seeking asylum. Observers and protesters at the scene have been Tweeting the arrival of a third police van, and more officers entering the embassy via a side door. The Press Association had earlier reported officers arriving outside the Ecuadorian Embassy, close to the Harrods store in Knightsbridge, London. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/ecuador-to-announce-assange-asylum-britain-threat-to-raid-embassy/story-fnd134gw-1226451503293
I hope they don't offend Ecuador's new best friend: China in talks with Ecuador over $12.5B refinery: http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/15/china-costarica-idINL4E8JE3R920120815

The McDonald's Mart

But most of them are Korean, so it can be hard to tell.

You could always ask the Excellent Horse-Like Lady if he's male.

I would happily purchase content but I cannot bear the optical media format - mainly due to the fact that I have a centralised media centre with XBMC running on several devices. If I could purchase a disk, rip it straight to the server and never touch it again that would be great. So far, I can handle DVDs to but the anti-ripping measures of BluRay have so far stopped me from upgrading my viewing experience to HD. Anti-piracy measures are having an adverse effect on my quality of life due to pixelation.

If only I could download content in a format that I could use as I wish. This sounds counter-intuitive as a lack of DRM will make piracy easy right? Well, DRM is not exactly stopping piracy is it?

Now that I have the cash, I will pay for content - but please let me have it in an open digital format, unfettered by warnings. Copying of disks in bulk for sale in mostly cash-sales markets will then soon be a thing of the past. You don't need to look far to see that physical copies of disks are a global problem in Australia , in Indonesia , in the US and in the UK to name just a few.

Wickedlasers put a laser on a frickin shark.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/sci-tech/reports-of-shark-seen-with-frickin-laser-attached-to-its-head-turn-out-to-be-true/story-fn5iztw3-1226342846334

Generals got jelly.

-AI

No doubt you will feel cheated if Australia doesn't receive all the benefits of Chinese attention that the United States has received.

FBI cracks down on China's elusive army of amateur spies

The FBI estimates that more than 3,000 "front companies" have been established by Chinese nationals in the US specifically to purloin military and economic secrets illegally.

Let Me Count The Ways China Is Stealing Our Secrets

China: Suspected Acquisition of U.S. Nuclear Weapon Secrets

This CRS Report discusses China’s suspected acquisition of U.S. nuclear weapon secrets, including that on the W88, the newest U.S. nuclear warhead.

China's Secret War

Of course, why worry?

China warns Australia against military pact with US
Aussies fear threat of war with China

I agree with most of your post but there is also evidence the plant was poorly maintained - Tepco admitted to falsifying maintenance records among several other misdemeanours.

TEPCO was also warned of the risk to the generators and did nothing to mitigate them - and still got an extension to their license (the 40 year old reactors' license had expired).

Hopefully something good will come out of this - Vermont (U.S. state) wants to refuse a request for a 20 year extension to the license of a similar design plant. A bit of backbone from our bureaucrats and politicians coupled with planning and foresight would go a long way in removing the stigma from nuclear (imo).

On a lighter note, we should take our manga comics more seriously - it appears one had predicted the Fukushima incident.

WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OUR WORLD??

Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser
Most UK Muslims will vote Labour
British Muslims recruited to fight for 'al-Qaeda' in Somalia
Hate preacher: One day we will stone adulterers
Sharia: a law unto itself?
'Record rise' in UK anti-Semitism
Assimilation’s Failure, Terrorism’s Rise
U.K. Cuts to Military Will Curb Influence
Iran cuts oil exports to UK and France

Much of Europe is in deep trouble.

The US might avoid the worst of it.... if it can prevent Iran from tossing a nuke at it and the EMP sends life back to 1901. The major European powers were supposed to put a lid on the problem - it didn't work out that way.

This.

I'm all behind the NBN.. so long as they prioritise to provide services for:
1) Areas that with no broadband
then
2) Areas that currently have badly services broadband
then
3) Areas limited to ADSL 1
then
4) Everywhere else

taking into account
A) All new suburbs / houses are to be connected as they are built

The problem with this is that it isn't economically viable. They need to get millions of users onboard and paying for the network in order to ensure sufficient capital and investment to extend to the areas that really need it.

The other problem is that the prices they are putting forth don't look too good when stacked up against ADSL 2.

Compare $50 for the DSL for 500GB with uploads not countered at DSL2+ speeds - that's 8M down 1Mup if you are close enough to an exchange (from TPG) ;
to
$49 for 40gig at 12mbps (from Optus) with uploads meters - which does not mean 40GB.. it means 40 GB total uploads and downloads.. so call that 30 GB or 20 GB.. depending on how you use your connection.

The worst part is that they feel the need to meter uploads and downloads. A major step backwards. Most people won't appreciate the impact of this until they are hit with their first excessive use bill.

They are still debating whether or not average joe will even join the NBN. This problem, however, is solved: they are destroying the copper network, and forcing everyone onto the NBN. Pundits have been guessing that if this didn't happen then the NBN would sink.

Did anyone mention that the Gov't has already stepped forward with a plan for a national NBN filter?

Now, how about a few thousand mesh network devices all over the country side...

Swings and roundabouts..

2009 under Labor 2006 under Liberal

2009 under Labor 2006 under Liberal. The Australian Research Council has also been used to apply pressure, through the government reducing ARC independence so the government can influence which areas of investigation receive funding.

How on earth are the people using Government computers supposed to "research" all of the dangers and issues associated with Child Pornography if they can't find it?

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/christian-mp-fred-nile-engulfed-in-net-porn-scandal/story-e6frf7l6-1225913110721
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/nsw-mp-fred-nile-denies-porn-has-been-viewed-on-computers-in-his-office/story-e6frg6nf-1225913267507
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/09/03/nsw-parliament%E2%80%99s-flawed-prn-hunt/
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/370016/child_porn_alarm_nsw_parliament/
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/09/02/Antigay_NSW_MP_Blames_Porn_on_Research/

The stimulation to cause orgasm may come from other parts of the body (clitoris, g-spot, etc), but so far I haven't heard the uterus as one of the erogenous zones.

Google or wikipedia for Uterine Orgasm if you dare. I'm not sure if it ranks alongside G-Spots and female ejaculations as a subject of dispute, but it's definitely not unheard of. Even without that, anecdotal evidence supports a change in orgasm after a hysterectomy.

I don't know anything about the donor so i'm not saying it's a big deal or not, but to dismiss it outright by saying that "mom's past menopause she has no use for it anyway" is a bit preemptive. There was a doctor who was taken to court for removing some poor lady's clitoris as part of a skin cancer removal procedure. He claimed it was necessary but is also reported to have told a nurse that "Her husband's dead so it doesn't matter anyway".

The nuclear shills didn't all go away. In Australia I watched Ziggy Switkowski appear on television about a week after the Japanese disaster and say that what was happening in Japan showed that the Japan crisis teaches much about value of nuclear energy. I am biased posting this as I have always hated Ziggy even when he was just a dumb cartoon character.

So which side does it use, left or right?

If a random blogger is going to submission spam slashdot with all of his two paragraph blogs plagiarizing news articles, the least he could do is actually LINK to some genuinely useful coverage of the story on a reputable sites...

• www.heraldsun.com.au
• www.dailytelegraph.com.au
• au.news.yahoo.com/
• www.torontosun.com
• www.nydailynews.com

sharks with lasers?

Sure! Swimming down Main Street

Those bastards. They're probably too busy blogging/tweeting etc. about the triviality of their daily lives. Maybe when they can just about be bothered we can get the much needed details of how they're doing it in the form of a wordpress blog or a flickr stream.

125 miles away, 100,000 fish died and washed up on the Arkansas River. o.O
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/dead-fish-in-arkansas-near-where-100000-blackbirds-dropped-from-sky/story-e6frf7k6-1225981011908?from=public_rss

I think it's worth adding that:

Both women boasted of their of their respective celebrity conquests on internet posts and mobile phones texts after the intimacy they would now see him destroyed for.

Ardin hosted a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the ‘crime’ and tweeted to her followers that she was with the “the world's coolest smartest people, it's amazing!”

source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/swedens-reputation-is-on-trial-in-julian-assange-case/story-e6frfhqf-1225965772832

Even then from the looks of it Assange is accused of "Swedish Rape" which is as related to rape as "Swedish Fish" are to fish.

After reading this artice I am not so sure. Perhaps many rape convictions rely almost entirely on the statement from the victim.

She didnt say stop you prick. She loved it all. You cannot enjoy it and come out days later to say "oh its rape coz im a girl and have the power to ruin peoples lives" .....

"Ardin hosted a party in Assange's honour at her flat after the 'crime' and tweeted to her followers that she was with the "the world's coolest smartest people, it's amazing!"

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/swedens-reputation-is-on-trial-in-julian-assange-case/story-e6frfhqf-1225965772832

And you know perfectly well that the rape charges are almost certainly false

I know I am quoting out of context here but I thought this article from a couple of days ago is somewhat relevant. Two women have consensual sex. One of them decides to stop and accuses the other of rape for the contact after she claims she called it off. The result is a conviction for rape.

Just a note, but NAB has made an effort to get every who has lost money due to the glitch compensation. No one, or very few should lose money due to the glitch. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/nab-cash-woes-all-weekend/story-e6frfh4f-1225961904137 "The bank also said it won't leave customers out of pocket through any penalties as a result of the technical glitch."

Gillard really should have lost the election, but the right-wing opposition party was lead by Tony Abbott; a pro-business anti-worker fundamentalist misogynist racist buffoon firmly in the pockets of big business and the tobacco industry, but an economic ignorance that was laughable. Every time Abbott opened his mouth he drove voters away. Like Palin in America, when a right-wing party is out of office they get captured by the crazies and swing further to the right thinking that will win them more voters. Of course it doesn't, and Abbott lost.

And so Gillard won by default... and now the filter is back. You would think the opposition would kick out Abbott and put in someone more centrist, but they refuse to admit they made a mistake and they're clinging on to him. Meanwhile the censorship regime rolls on. Both parties are pro-censorship. What are we to do?
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/gillard-ushers-in-the-era-of-farce/story-e6frfhqf-1225896276726

Funny that I saw this article earlier today.

"CHILDREN have grown too big for their school chairs, a survey of 750 schools revealed.

Teachers said "desk and chair sizes were often inappropriate".

It is understood the NSW Education Department has been taking orders for custom-sized chairs.

Paediatric dietician Susie Burrell said children who were overweight often didn't carry obvious fat but instead looked older than their age."

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/school-children-are-now-becoming-too-fat-to-fit-in-class-chairs/story-e6frf7l6-1225944436838

Fielding will be gone in six months so maybe the policy will change then.

Yeah, to be replaced by John Madigan of the Democratic Labor Party -- which is just another social conservatism party.

Different party name, basically same policies. We managed to replace one crazy with another just like him.

And what's even funnier is that both Fielding and Madigan are only getting voted in on preference deals. Virtually no one actually voted or wanted them. I will sleep better if the Green's get their way (which hopefully they should given they now have the balance of power) and change the rules related to preferences in the senate.

Fielding will be gone in six months so maybe the policy will change then.

27 billion divided by the population of 22.45 million is $1200 per PERSON not per household. So in our home - 2 adults and 2 kids that's $4800. I will be paying $480 a year for 10 years in addition tax as will all Australians.

And you'll be paying $24.7 billion / 22.45 million * 4 = $4400 every year in tangible costs associated with alcohol abuse.

I know which I'd prefer to see cut.

My impression is that money flows quite freely when it comes to climate science and that linking your research to climate science smooths the way to grant approval. Right climate for big bucks

Of course I could be mistaken because I am not looking at hard data, only anecdotes, yet my impression is that everything, from Kyoto, to Bali and Copenhagen and Mexico is that the money flows freely. On a personal note, I know people I used to work with who recently secured millions of dollars from national meteorology department in my country to do climate modelling work : fill a room with shiny computers and put many people on permanent payroll. Our government has a climate change ministry, which sucks 80 million dollars out of our economy and delivers nothing at all (no legislation to support or execute at this present time and unlikely that any will come into law in a few years at least). I'm sure with that sort of budget they can entice the right people to join up.

I assume there is already some kind of decent metrics for rating players to enable fantasy leagues - the sort where average joe picks a bunch of players (from all teams) that he likes, and compares his "fantasy team" to all the other average joes who choose to spend their time doing the same. What metrics do these fantasy leagues use?

Aussie rules football (AFL) has very specific player scoring, developed from the work of Champion Data (not a large amount of detail there). These data and metrics are now used by every offical team, commentators and form the basis of most fantasy league scores. On the local news site which runs the largest fantasy league competition there is a lot more about how points are awarded, and performances of players through the season (about halfway through season 2010 at the moment).

Looking even more in depth, creating heat maps from player data, are some PHD students at my old university

I would have thought these kinds of data and analysis would be even more advanced in a sport that has much more history and far more fans around the world than AFL?