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This is the section in the Prohibited Weapons Act of New South Wales, from http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/fragview/inforce /act+127+1998+sch.1+0+N

(18) Any hand-held defence or anti-personnel device that is designed to administer an electric shock on contact, such as the Taser Self-Defence Weapon or an electrified brief-case, but not including any such hand-held device that may lawfully be used on an animal in accordance with the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979.

Tasers are illigal in the Australian State of New South Wales.

http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/fragview/inforce /act+127+1998+sch.1+0+N

...but maybe someone will someday make the air to electricity machine from Atlas Shrugged?

Australia has a long history of introduced species causing damage. The most obvious to people living in sydney at the moment is the Indian Mynah, after humans themselves ;-)

Just look here (warning: explicit pictures).

Oh yeah, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All.

When do you have a right to a refund?

Simply, a refund would be in order if the goods:

* have a fault that you could not have known about when you purchased them
* do not do the job that you were led to believe they would do
* do not match a sample you were shown
* are not as they were described.

Don't believe everything you read

"No refunds" signs are illegal. If you buy a faulty product and you weren't aware of the fault at the time of the sale, you can usually return it to the store and expect either:

* a repair
* a replacement or
* a refund.

After reading the article, this plan to use sun-tracking mirrors to melt salt sounds a little more complicated than this Australian plan. Not only that, but the Australian plan scores more points in the coolness department as the project intends to build the world's tallest structure -- a tower 1 kilometer high. BTW, IANAA (I am not an australian)

For more in-depth information regarding poker machines follow this link: http://www.dgr.nsw.gov.au/HTML/LAB/tech_standards. html. This will take you to the page at the NSW (Australia) Government's Standards page for Electronic Gaming Machines.

They're random. They go through quite rigorous testing. The RNG has to comply with what a particular jurisdiction specifies.

Fines for not complying can include loss of licence, which means you may as well close your company. So the manufacturers are very carefull with their products, but some mistakes do happen occasionally.

There is no real cheating, everyone is told that a particular machine gives back a certain percentage. So imagine you walk up to a 90% RTP machine and insert $90, you loose it all. The next person plays $10 and gets $90. There's the 90% RTP, $100 went in, $90 went out.

I'll repeat some advice from a previous poster: If you can't afford to lose the money you want to insert, DON'T PLAY! It's "entertainment". Some people go to a strip-club, buy "dancin' dollars" and stuff them down g-strings and watch pretty girls (hopefully) go 'round, other people buy credits and watch the pretty pictures spin 'round!

Enjoy!

This article should have really been about SensorWeb since SensorML is just an implementation detail.

-Kevin

More significantly, the water processing and sewerage treatment plans were both knocked out, threatening to cause the flow of sewerage into water storage facilities. Imagine the capital of Australia with no fresh water or sewerage for a minute.

Anyway, Mount Stromlo, which was destroyed, is visible on the map, and i've included a section of the Bush Fire Brigade Map which shows the region and the fires.

Updates on the situation can be found here.

True. But courts in other jurisdictions would be following this decision intently. Example: The Australian High Court's decision that the legal practice of terra nullius was invalid set a precedent that was followed by many other judiciaries.

They have got to get a better name. "Blender" sounds like a virus that scrambles files.

Suggestions: Vertexasour, 3Diggit, Rendon, Rendall, Renderex, Animatrix, Vectron, PenguinSeer, Envisionator.....

The "law" in question was passed by parliament, and received the royal assent, but has not yet been proclaimed, and is therefore not yet law, and not enforceable.

Electronic Frontiers Australia's information page about this legislation can be found here and the report reccomending the repeal of the legislation can be found here (PDF file).

as a side note, I will add I've just seen *one* Flash site I liked

I thought that too, until I found this: http://www.soh.nsw.gov.au/virtual_tour/vrtour2.htm l

Why not post an informational article about mathematics or information theory that might actually enrich or prove beneficial to the careers of Slashdot's readers?

The occasional reminder from the natural world about the strange things that actually happen in defiance of all the best theoretical simplifications is never a bad thing.

For the record, this new class of insect ranks somewhere between the Coelacanth and the Wollemi Pine on at least a couple of measures of significance. In both those cases the media got quite excited.

On the Linnaean kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species scale, the Coelacanth ranks as the only living member of class actinistia which shares a closer common ancestor with the tetrapods (including us) than does any other fish in the ocean. However the Woolemi Pine only ranks as a new genus of the Araucariaceae family, and any common ancestor with us is clearly much further in the past than that of this new insect "gladiator".

Seeing as the Linnaean txonomy project has been ongoing since Carl Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae in 1735, the illusion of completeness at higher levels ensures newsworthiness when something is discovered for which the closest related fossils known are tens of millions of years old.

So I really do see a similarities between finding a new bug in the Brandberg Mountains of Namibia and finding a new bug in software that had been running successfully for years.

BTW, I have no idea how anybody could imagine that calling a story "homosexual" would deter many Slashdot readers.

if you people would just vote green these things wouldent happen ;)
however the moon is not blue, and hell hasn't frozen over.
i suggest checking out this site for contact details of NSW members.

NSW Crime

Murder steady, just about everything else way up.

Ban in 1996? In terms of public health interest, I don't think either position can be justified by these stats.

ramble

In socio-political sense,I see the laws as destructive. Certain groups in society are privileged (cops, military, rich, government), there might be perception of "us vs them" (you only need a perception!), citizen rights and responsibilities are diminished, building a client mentality with dependency, passivity, patronism, etc. Australia doesn't need any less division right now.

/ramble

A (ex)cattlestation full of African game animals would be no worse on the enviroment than a cattlestation full of tradition grazing livestock.

Really this is just going to be like Dubbo's open plane zoo , but on a grander scale

Perhaps people should read it.

I'd be seriously referring this case to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) because this represents a violation of my privacy. Your own ISP is collecting information about your internet access without your prior knowledge or permission (granted the more technically adept have already guessed it by now by looking at their access logs, but I'm also talking about the people who don't know). Yes, I know that other services have doing the same thing for years but it is easier to prevent an external company, that exercises no influence over your ISP (eg. Gator), from collecting personal information without permission.

Now IANAL, but unfortunately there is no specific legal protection for this kind of activity (at least not in NSW) under the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW), as the principles in the Act that must be applied in the collection and use of personal information (see Section 10) only apply to the public sector and are still subject to exemptions.

Your best bet would be the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000 (which amends the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth)), as this adds conditions under which the private sector can collect personal information. It's also a Commonwealth Law, so that the Act can be applied to cases all over the country (although in most cases, the courts tend to follow the lead of NSW). One big caveat of this amendment is that this still could possibly allow Excite@home to collect information if "the collection is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of a legal or equitable claim" (see Schedule 3, 10.1(e)). But the way things are going for Excite@home at the moment, lawyers would probably be the last thing on their minds.

If you're serious about putting a stop to this, then try your government privacy body (in my state, it's the Office of the NSW Privacy Commissioner). More letters to these people (particularly now as it's close to an election) would help all of us stand up for our collective rights.

You believe that?! Lemme guess -- you were born yesterday. What did happen is that the NRA so fraudulently misused Australian crime statistics, that the Federal Attorney-General was led to make an official complaint.

Should you wish to get your information from a more^H^H^H^H reputable source, try the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics for NSW (which includes Australia's most "crime-ridden city," Sydney {Shock! Horror!!}). More generally check out the Australian Institute of Criminology. [It] is scary... shit just how gullible some people are.

Running the complete text of speeches, not just campaign speeches but Parliament speeches too, was a regular occurence in the Times, in London, in the 19th century. No idea why it stopped, but I can only guess cost or audience considerations.

Parliamentary prodeedings in New South Wales are available at the Hansard page.

That sort of thing seems more like a web function to me - frankly, square-inch for inch, news pages are more expensive than web space. If you want full text dumps, the web would be the place to put them (provided you could pay someone to transcribe them...).

Myself, if I'm looking for raw info on news, I go to the web, if I want commentary, I go to the papers. I don't think this is an intrinsic feature of the web, but whenever I'm looking for information on the web, the sheer volume of irrelevancy/inanity overcomes me.

Would you call a region of a wall that is a few percent less thick a "hole"?

I wouldn't even call it a wall. It's a fluid region of gas that changes depending on season and weather conditions that acts as a filter for UV-B and other radiation.

"experts" can't even explain the causes of the ice ages.

Nice straw man. What does meteorological history have to do with current climatic changes caused by emitted chemicals? Have a look at this to learn how ozone loss happens.

California wants to do just this to pretty much *anything* with a gas engine in it.

Also look at to learn that California is in the top bracket of states ranked by hazardous air pollutants.

a few percent less thick a "hole"?

A few percent less than what? Measured when? The actual value ranges from 11-30% during the year, measured by deviation from the levels during the 1960s.
Over Australia, according to the 1997 State Of the Environment report, ozone levels hit about 89%. This means "the increase in erythemal UV-B radiation (the most damaging for plants and animals) is expected to be about 13%". Don't forget that zooplankton and phytoplankton have no protection from UV-B. If they start dying, the ocean has big problems.

Australia has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world, both malignant and non-malignant.

Don't laugh.

I'm not.

At an IIA meeting in Sydney Australia around March or April, there were a couple of speakers from the NS W Police Service - Child Protection Enforcement Agency.

The obligations outlined to ISP's in that meeting were that once a valid warrant had been issued, ISP's were obligated to Nb>capture all the packets entering and leaving a users account. Those packets would then be turned over to the Police force whose responsibility it would be to decode them. The ISP would not have to decrypt or de-encode them only capture them as they went from the router to the modem.

These cases were in the prosecuting of Child Porn offenders.

Just some food for thought