Slashdot Mirror

Really.

So in order to get around a bad-faith company abusing their market position, I should conduct a multi-hundred-thousand dollar transaction to sell my house, pack up all my earthly belongings at financial and time expense, and move to where another company may or may not be abusing their monopoly position already?

https://www.news.com.au/techno... Not so far fetched - that was our Prime Minister at the time, who was directing the government owned nbnco on the expectations of the national broadband network implementation - the new monopoly for fixed line connections.

I'm sure you can see the irony where the owner of the entity that is going to make broadband available to every single premise in the nation is telling someone to move house for a better internet connection. Just WTH are they going to deliver?

One obvious recent example is Kurt Eichenwald, who posted a screenshot of a flyer that he claims was anti-semitic. One of the tabs open in the background was for tentacle porn.

Eichenwald was doing some pretty sketchy things and pissed off a fair number of people. This ensured that the tentacle-porn thing got strewn across the internet far and wide, to the gleeful delight of everyone who hated him.

Reading that makes microdosing LSD sound little less crazy than you many might have thought.

Have a look at this.

Yes, this is the Wikipedia entry for the Rio Tinto prosecution.

Several mining companies reported that their computer systems were compromised around that time.

Roughly 10 years ago a high profile Australian scientist did a TV interview and stated that it may never rain again in the Australian outback [sic].

That's not actually the truth is it? (Though I'm liable to be convinced otherwise by a citation from a reliable source).

I'm presuming you are talking about Tim Flannery. Here is the transcript of that infamous TV interview. So here is what he actually said, that has widely been quoted as "it will never rain again":

... since 1998 particularly, we've seen just drought, drought, drought, and particularly regions like Sydney and the Warragamba catchment - if you look at the Warragamba catchment figures, since '98, the water has been in virtual freefall, and they've got about two years of supply left ...

Well, you can't predict the future; that's one of the things that you learn fairly early on, but if I could just say, the general patterns that we're seeing in the global circulation models ... are saying the same sort of thing that we're actually seeing on the ground. ...

We'll know probably within two or three years, I suppose, how this is going to play out, particularly for Sydney, because its water supply is limited to that sort of scale, but it is my fear that the new weather regime is going to be a much drier one, and while we may get the odd good rainfall event, they're going to be much less frequent than in the past, and we'll just be in a different climatic regime ... the worst-case scenario for Sydney is that the climate that's existed for the last seven years continues for another two years. In that case, Sydney will be facing extreme difficulties with water ...

So "roughly 10 years" later, how is the drought situation in Eastern Australia panning out ... this even from the Murdoch press, speaks to its seriousness.

Here in Australia, a number of well-meaning public projects have been derailed because they had loopholes that allowed gaming of the scheme by beneficiaries, or were gamed or abused by insiders. I hope Bezos includes a lot of checks and balances in this scheme.

It's not easy when it's the politicians doing the gaming, on behalf of themselves - either through donations back to their party, or as jobs after they finally get booted out for their blatant corruption and/or incompetence.

To name a few:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
https://www.news.com.au/financ...
https://www.brisbanetimes.com....
https://www.brisbanetimes.com....
https://www.computerworld.com....

On Earth, yes. Available to Earth, still technically yes but closer to no.

https://www.news.com.au/techno...

$14,000,000,000,000,000 worth of metals in one asteroid somewhat upsets the cost model.

Fast Acting.... you mean like a massive battery connected to a wind farm?

https://www.teslarati.com/tesl...

https://www.news.com.au/techno...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...

Have a nice day.

The Reuters article is lacking details. news.com.au has a story with more details.

It appears that their payment processing was down too. So, not just retail customers with accounts at NAB, but also merchants who use them for payment processing were not able to accept payments. The article I read does not state that clearly, but the taxi patron seemed to complain that it was the inability of the cabbie to accept a card payment that was the problem, rather than that his own individual card did not work.

It sucks when you are the customer and the service fails, but moreso when you are the collateral damage.

why not operate a solar powered salt powered station to generate power and get paid more money... because would earn you more money be more efficient and truely sustainable

This is already being charged by wind power. Why would switching to solar suddenly make it much more efficient?

The 100MW battery will provide the region with 129 megawatt-hours of energy to be paired with Neoen's 99-turbine wind farm at Hornsdale, near Jamestown, South Australia.

Over 50% of South Australia's electricity comes from sun and wind-based sources, so perhaps you need to educate yourself before jumping to conclusions.

No, coral as a whole is not going to go extinct. But some species will (some already have) - many others will not be able to adapt rapidly enough, given the current pace of change. In time, once the climate settles down, the survivors will doubtless adapt to the new norms and new reefs will flourish.

But on more human timescales, it seems all but certain we'll lose most of a major World Heritage site and one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the world. We lost 27% of it in 2016, and we're set to lose up to another third after 2017. I took my kids diving there last year, while there was still something left worth seeing, and the deterioration I've personally witnessed since the 80s and 90s was heartbreaking.

The real crime is that the Australian Government has taken this long to summon even this level of action. Agricultural runoff has been a problem for decades, but the Government has consistently underfunded efforts to improve this, censored UNESCO reports describing the Reef's vulnerability, lobbied hard to avoid an Endangered listing, and both political parties have given every support for major new dredging and coal-handling developments at Abbott Point that will certainly further worsen water quality on the nearby Reef.

Even if you view the Reef merely as a valuable national asset, this negligence will cost us all.

There is quite bit of difference between making content and paying a production house to make content for you. Still quite an impressive list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and it goes on https://media.netflix.com/en/o.... Of course http://www.news.com.au/technol..., NewsCorpse who own Fox, think it is a really bad idea, competing against their content is an extremely bad idea.

Now that explains why Netflix went from friend to last millenniums content dinosaurs to being the enemy to be cut off from content (I dare say, the more popular Netflix become the more they wanted to charge Netflix, Netflix's response fine, we will make our own, see you at the bargaining table).

You can let pre-paid (unregistered) Opal cards go into negative. They give you the benefit of the doubt that you'll top it up and pay the negative balance - which cost them : sydney commuters using unregistered opal cards to underpay fares by more than 1 million.

Also - burner mobile phones? Not in Australia - impossible to obtain one legally.

Elon's got your UPS, it's a bit spendy but hopefully they will get some custom versions for fab plants, hospitals, etc...
140 milliseconds... not bad for 100 megawatts...
http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/thats-a-record-south-australias-tesla-battery-responds-to-coalfired-plant-failure/news-story/d9e02c0dbf6774ffea948a1b919f3b7f

Google is your friend.
Not my original source just the 3rd result when searching for "Russian troll farm funding". A very informative article on the Troll farm including interviews with people who worked there. This was an up to 400 person operation with just 13 people indicted on poking their noses into the US election.

Essentially it was just a pro-Putin organization that like to stick their noses into everything but as the article notes:

Most of the operation focused on the separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine and Western sanctions against Russia, not political races in the West

1) Russian Oligarch story

2) Free Beacon/Fusion/Steel Timelines I'd suggest clicking on some of the "read more" links for better breakdown of each groups involvement.

3) British volunteers working with Hillary campaign.

These were not necessarily my original sources, just ones at the top of the Google results.

There was a declaration of war by the Chinese at the Davos summit. Choose a side, globalist.

FALSE. NK missles have gone a bit over Japan. There is zero indication they have the technology to hit anything besides the ocean.

FALSE. The missiles were a lot more than a bit over Japan, in one case the apogee was 4,500km. An ICBM will generally have an apogee of about 1,200km, so by flattening the trajectory the range can be greatly increased.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency says that during its 53 minutes flight time, the missile soared some 4500km into space — that’s 10 times higher than the orbit of the International Space Station.
Defence analysts say this demonstrates it has the power and range of a fully functional ICBM capable of travelling more than 10,000km - putting all of the United States mainland and most of the world within its reach.

http://www.news.com.au/world/a...

If you do not like slavery, don't buy at Amazon....

We are human beings, not slaves and animals: Brutal conditions inside Amazon warehouse

Timed toilet breaks, impossible targets and workers falling asleep on feet: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

That's sounds awful! Paying ~150% minimum wage for a hard job. To think it is still legal to force people into chains and work in a warehouse. What? They volunteered and applied for those jobs? Hmm. Seems like laws and/or workers need to change then, not Amazon.

If you do not like slavery, don't buy at Amazon....

We are human beings, not slaves and animals: Brutal conditions inside Amazon warehouse

Timed toilet breaks, impossible targets and workers falling asleep on feet: Brutal life working in Amazon warehouse

FYI http://www.news.com.au/technol...

Using the example of Sony, which was famously hacked by North Korea in late 2014, Alexander said that if Sony had gone after the hackers, it might have prompted them to throw artillery...

Except 'someone' did gone after the hackers (not specific target but North Korea) and DDoS their internet. Still no artillery thrown, so better use a different example.

It's funny though, this article wanted you to pick yes or no, but you can't pick yes. That's because if they can hack back, they wouldn't have gotten hacked in the first place. So we're left with no, not because they aren't allow but because they don't know how to hack back.

First, see what kind of social and economic mischief you can carry out in the West by way of "anonymous" activity on the Internet - do it cheap, like get kids to help out, and take note how hard it is to trace back to the culprit.
(in parallel, see how much actual damage can be carried out, using Ukraine as a guinea-pig).
Next, notice well it all worked, beyond all reasonable expectations, even to the extent of swaying elections of public officials in the U.S. (they're holding Congressional hearings about us!), and encouraging open revolt against the state and inflaming street unrest.
Third, in view of the fact that Russian officials do not tolerate street unrest and open revolt against the state, conclude that this "research experiment" has proven without question that the Internet is a danger to the Motherland and its beloved leader, Valdimir Putin.
Fourth and finally, take pre-emptive action based on this valuable research to crush this threat and make sure it don't never happen here (Russian military take note... could be useful someday; continue research).
P.S.: President Xi says to Putin in his heavy Chinese accent, "way ahead of you."
P.P.S.: Kim Jong-un says it was all my idea.

I don't think it's been such a big thing here. However, subtle things like one of our biggest ISPs throttling Netflix (maybe because they half only cable tv network here), is probably also an example of what can happen. http://www.news.com.au/technol...

I tried that. It didn't work for me. My parrot chose Alexa.

Less of a bribe more of trying to lean from history.
"Australia 'cracked top-secret US jet fighter codes'" http://www.news.com.au/nationa... (March 17, 2009)
"The Americans kept saying they'd provide the codes, but never did."
The new thinking is to spend big with the USA and everything will be so much better this generation.

OP made a stupid (but funny) comment, but Universities and places of higher learning could be under the pump as students don't even bother to show up for lectures and instead watch recordings instead.

http://www.news.com.au/finance...

This Russian conspiracy theory stuff is getting old

Here is my bots reply to your Kremlin bot. Putin is a dictator who routinely kills his political opponents and who is very much capable of being complicit in killing his own people as a politically expedient as he did for Boris Yeltsin before he came to power.

I know and I understand Kurzweil's argument. All the people mucking horse stables can just become factory line workers for the Model T. And it's true that it has always been that way.

But our current circumstance is something new. I really believe it's going to catch society completely flat footed. Hardly anybody is preparing for this. AI coupled with automation is going to eliminate entire fields of work. There will be nowhere to transition to.

Here's my favorite example: Lettuce Bot. TL;DR - Lettuce Bot can work a field of lettuce same as 20 people.

I know, so what? Right? Those 20 people can go do something else. Kurzweil appears to be correct. But he isn't. Those low-skill jobs can ALL be automated now. Those 20 lettuce workers can go to a carrot farm. But it's just as easy now to make Carrot Bot and Onion Bot and so on. Eventually all farm jobs will be done by a bot.

So switch jobs, right? Same problem. As a mental exercise try to think of a low skill job that can't be replaced by automation.

This is the beginning of something new. Job categories aren't being repurposed, they're being eliminated.

I chose that link because the source (Fairfax) has a vested interest in keeping property prices high and downplaying the impact of Chinese investment (their only profitable division is Domain, their real estate group). Fairfax have a vested interest in downplaying the role of Chinese investment as their business model benefits from high property prices - population pressures in major cities are causing increasing levels of racism in Australia right now, and blowback against Chinese investment could reduce their slice of the money flowing through the property market.

As I posted elsewhere, the Australian residential property market has a total capitalisation of about 6 trillion, and properties are held for an average of 10 years (Source), so a good estimate for the yearly turnover is 600 billion. 31 billion (excluding money channelled through tax havens) is 5% of total turnover, which is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. The decline they are projecting is a wild-ass guess given statistics for the year aren't available yet.

If you add an extra 5% in demand for a finite resource, it will absolutely make a difference to prices, because people will bid higher to purchase houses. Do you have any evidence that it won't; or are you going off gut feel?

The Australian residential property market has a total capitalisation of about 6 trillion. However, on average, properties are held for 10 years (Source), so a good estimate for the yearly turnover is 600 billion. 31 billion (excluding money channelled through tax havens) is 5% of total turnover, which is concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne.

If you add an extra 5% in demand, it will absolutely push prices up by more than that 5%, because people will bid higher to purchase houses.

Down under we're busy blocking more torrent sites - like that ever worked in stopping piracy...
http://www.news.com.au/technol...

For all those people wondering what we're comparing the iceberg to. Apparently it's bigger than:

Madrid: 604km^2
London: 1572km^2
Luxembourg: 2586km^2
Twice the size of the Australian Capitol Territory: 4716km^2
*
Delaware: 6452km^2
Four times** the size of the Australian Capitol Territory: 9432km^2

* Size of iceberg actually slots in here.
** The twice the size and four times the size were both in the same article.

I firstly read about this in a Spanish newspaper claiming that it was bigger than Madrid. Afterwards, I found out in Twitter that it was bigger than London. And now I know that it is as big as Delaware! And the worst part is that I don't even have a reasonably accurate idea about how big it is! LOL.

You think you have it hard, this article says it is both twice AND four times the size of the Australian Capital Territory.

At least I know how big the ACT is but I still have no idea about the size of this iceberg.

Don't bother. If he's still not learned the lessons of life at 45, he's too set in his ways to change. And let's face it, he's just not worth the effort.

He claims "I don't give a shit any more" but obviously he does. He doth protest too much.

I bike 50km a day, I don't break a knee when I miss a stair, I can stay out, I can drink, eat whatever I want.

Why would I date a wrinkly, out-of-shape, pre-menopausal senior citizen shut-in with no modern interest

"pre-menopausal; senior citizen?"

You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Senior citizens who are pre-menopausal? That would be impressive. Also, more men break their hips than women. And "out-of-shape"? I'll probably outlive you. That's the problem with men, when the body starts failing, it fails fast and hard. Why do you think men die younger?

And androgen replacement therapy for men has risks, unlike estrogen replacement therapy for women, which protects against stroke, heart disease, bone decalcification, and muscle and strength loss, and adds 3 years on average to life span over untreated women, who already have an advantage over men. And now that HRT is no longer "as little as possible, for the shortest time possible", expect more improvements in life span.

And there are plenty of women who don't look their age, without resorting to botox or face lifts, just a healthy lifestyle.

It was Ukrainian cybercriminals who wanted to make money but failed to do that because their email was blocked: http://www.news.com.au/technol... The reason Ukraine was the epicenter of the attack was because the criminals was from Ukraine and therefore had better access to Ukrainian targets or knew them better

anti-white speech seems more funny than offensive

I wonder if these people find it funny.

This is the story I meant to link to. The other one mentioned this incident and explains the increasing vulnerability as "renewables" become a greater part of the power generation mix.

South Australia's power grid is described by some as "The world's crash test dummy for renewables generation"

http://www.news.com.au/nationa...

And this is why we need better passenger rail,

Yeah. Good luck with that in the heat.

"hospitals backup power to be reviewed" (Oct 11, 2016)
"... failed in the blackout because of a fuel pump issue"
http://www.news.com.au/nationa...

Try this instead

Like Al Gore using "the better good" of "environmentalism" to make himself money. In this case, it's a whole bunch of raging driving it.

they aren't making any more/there are NO "land factories"

Oh please... Tell that to China Dubai Iceland...

Don't forget the suicide of their chief scientist:

http://www.news.com.au/finance...

The goal genuinely was to build an all-in-one diagnostic system within a couple of years. But each and every competitors system has been built from decades of research. To look as if they had something working, they just used their competitors products to provide results.

“We also see the nostalgic interest in these products as an opportunity to draw consumers’ attention to our latest game system, Nintendo Switch.” http://www.news.com.au/technol...

That's funny, but I guess it makes sense when you consider that all of Nintendo's newer games are just rehashes of the same old crap you can just play on an emulator like this.

“We also see the nostalgic interest in these products as an opportunity to draw consumers’ attention to our latest game system, Nintendo Switch.” http://www.news.com.au/technol...

Syrian military jets attacked the site, according to every report - even the Russians agree with that. There's documented evidence that Syria has been carrying out chemical attacks repeatedly for years. And attempts to place blame on the rebels are implausible at best, described as "laughable" by experts from the US, Britain, Israel, Turkey, and others.

With Assad's own jets? Evidence says no.

Yeah, how are they so cheap?

Oh right:
http://www.news.com.au/finance...
http://viewfromthewing.boardin...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...