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Then you'll love the mysterious pickled dragon.

Colour me unimpressed - the Prime Minister of this country (John Howard) phone spammed the continent prior to the last election, then paid his smug looking son to spam the nation.

Anyway, back on topic, here's an article from a local paper - it contains a link to the actual code of practice (pdf warning)

Colour me unimpressed - the Prime Minister of this country (John Howard) phone spammed the continent prior to the last election, then paid his smug looking son to spam the nation.

Anyway, back on topic, here's an article from a local paper - it contains a link to the actual code of practice (pdf warning)

While simple disguises might not fool the facial recognition software, a silicone mask could probably even fool a human at first. picture I'd suggest investing in one high quality mask for the near future.

They seem to be popping up in Australia all the time. Maybe they are too sophisticated for the American market?

First hover car seen in Perth, Australia

Second hover car spotted in Perth Australia"

The ALP is an unelectable rabble at the moment, with neither vision nor the courage required to take real leadership in this country. At every opportunity, they shoot themselves in the foot. Just recently they had the government on the run over the AWB scandle (example), in which kick-backs were paid to a trucking company partly-owned by the Saddam Hussein government, yet the ALP took the time to empty magazine after magazine into its own foot with party hacks and union officials trying to unseat members from safe seats. The Australian Government is quite safe where it is right now, and anything the ALP proposes is naught but hot air.

The ALP is an unelectable rabble at the moment, with neither vision nor the courage required to take real leadership in this country. At every opportunity, they shoot themselves in the foot. Just recently they had the government on the run over the AWB scandle (example), in which kick-backs were paid to a trucking company partly-owned by the Saddam Hussein government, yet the ALP took the time to empty magazine after magazine into its own foot with party hacks and union officials trying to unseat members from safe seats. The Australian Government is quite safe where it is right now, and anything the ALP proposes is naught but hot air.

Great PR spin - and I'm sure the usual suspects (read NYT, Wash Post etc)
will give M$ some oxygen.
For the real picture look here: Security is not a PR problem

The US has no competitor at the very high-end of the quality/effectiveness market,

The airframe and powerplant is only modestly important in modern combat aircraft, though the US is very good at this type of design.

Sure about that?

"Games Minister Justin Madden made the bans official on Wednesday when he gazetted rehearsals on the MCG and the Yarra River, exposing media organisations to $240,000 fines should they breach the rules." http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/03/09/11417016 36051.html

Yes, in Melbourne, Australia if you decide you want to report on a sporting event taking place on a public river you get a nice fine.

just make sure you don't accidentally set your scrotum on fire

Not to mention shit like this happening.

Shitdrummer.

*blah blah * bush *blah blah* Is that really the entire substance of your argument?

Examples of EU/EC corruption:
Auditors reject EU accounts again
For E.U. Critics, a Cautionary Tale
Kinnock EU whistleblower 'hung out to dry'
EU accounting worse than Enron, says whistleblower
New scandal hits EC over insider trading
EU in turmoil after executive commission resigns

Wow, you are right, the EU/EC is a regular shining white pillar of purity. I'm being sarcastic, BTW. I found these examples with 3 minutes and google. Yes, there where many more. ~nate

Have the read the EULA associated with Windows use? I certainly hope they have, because the terms are pretty outrageous, and potentially dangerous for anyone (corporation, person, government agency, etc).

Here's a systematic comparison of the two.

Here's a summary:

Some features about software covered by the EULA:

        * copying was prohibited
        * could be used only on one computer with a maximum of 2 processors
        * cannot be used as a webserver or fileserver
        * required registration after 30 days
        * could stop working if hardware changes were made
        * updates could change the EULA if the company so wished
        * could be transferred to another user only once
        * the new user must agree to the licence terms (no specification how this could be achieved)
        * imposes limitations on reverse engineering
        * gives Microsoft rights to collect information about the system and the its use
        * gives Microsoft the right to supply this information to other organisations
        * gives Microsoft the right to make changes to the computer without having to ask.
        * warranty for the first 90 days
        * fixes, updates or patches carry no warranty

Some features found in the GPL:

        * freedom to copy, modify and redistribute the software
        * precludes one party from preventing another from having these same freedoms
        * provides coverage for rights of users to copy, modify and redistribute the software
        * no warranty as there is no fee
        * can be sold if the user so decides and services for such software can be charged for
        * any patents must be licensed for everyone's use or not licensed at all
        * modified software must carry no licence fees
        * source code must be provided
        * if there is a change in license, the general terms of the existing one will be maintained.

Against who, exactly?

Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Maybe you've heard of one or two of their many outrages? If you're well informed there are another three, or four, or five or six other commonly known ones. (Actually, there are many more.) And this is not counting just one or two of the many widely known foiled plots.

They even need close scrutiny in prison.

How did this escape your attention?

Westerners would never act with such mindless hatred like those dirty arabs do

My bet is they're trying to figure out what the Prime Minister of Australia will do next.

How design supporters insult God's intelligence

and the following documentary about some priests who are also hard core scientists:

Galileo's Sons

A few days ago the Pope came out and reinforced the Catholic Church's view that Science and religion are compatible. In other words even the Pope thinks evolution is valid. Here is the original speech in Italian.

All in all the proponents of intelligent design are looking more and more like the snake oil salesmen they are.

Well, using that same logic, this example would justify a US-led retaliation, right?

Seriously, there is a disturbing lack of perspective and proportionality amongst these savages. Yes, savages, because that is exactly what the extreme nutjobs (those making the death threats) are - xenophobic troglodytes who can't tolerate any conduct by others that violates their strict code.

I don't think greedy is a big enough word... this is SCO sized rip off.

The telcos are currently charging what, about 3 to 4 times what a broadband connection costs in Japan or Europe? And the connection speed in the US is 1/10th that in Japan & Europe? So really the US telcos are overcharging their customers for near monopoly rates in the US now!

So, why so upset at Google? I am begining to wonder if Steve "the chair" Ballmer has Microsoft lobbyists pushing this with the telco execs. Granted, not long ago I would never believed it, but since it came out that Microsoft financed SCO's lawsuits through very shady PIPE financing to try to hurt IBM, I really wonder. What would you do to keep your pile of cash coming in if you were in their shoes?

don't think so

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/google-death-p enalty-for-bmw-site/2006/02/06/1139074113688.html

Sure... Only in the US. Surely nobody in Australia would sue after diving off a bridge with a no diving sign. And they won, too.

Do we own the right to our own image? I was always under the impression that anyone could photograph anything as long as they didn't break any laws to acquire it. Here is another interesting, related story of a couple guys charged with taking pictures of a girl on the beach in Sydney. They were charged with "offensive behaviour in public".

For example, here in the US, in ANY court case, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. In many europeon countries, this varies with the type of court case. Libel cases, for instance, have the burden of proof placed on the defendent in Brittan.

You keep telling yourself that. Here's what Reverend Desmond Tutu had to say:

"We are appalled that revered conventions are being blatantly flouted such as the dictum that someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty and that everyone is entitled to legal defence of his choice and that habeas corpus obtains. I support your efforts to ensure justice is done for your loved ones and that they will be given access to the families. God bless you." -- The Most Reverend Desmond Tutu -- http://www.guantanamohrc.org/

The US spin machine even has a nifty term for what they're doing: Internment Without Trial. Wtf? They just slapped a happy-happy name on "guilty until proven innocent" and you guys bought it. Loyal sheep are already parroting the US government's implication that innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to certain people.

The hand-wringing about innocent until proven guilty is all very well but the assumption must inevitably be applied a little differently to someone accused making off with a bun out of a bakers, than people held captive in the act of fighting against our forces and our allies. Given the circumstances in which they were taken captive, I am personally far more concerned about the threat to our security these people represent, than the conduct of those that detained them. Kelly Tait, Edinburgh -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4204997.s tm

Ok, admittedly she's British. Do you think most Americans would say any different? What worries me most is that it seems US citizens are less informed of what goes on in Guantanamo than people from the UK and Europe and Australia. Aren't you frightened by that?

As I said, remove the beam from thine own eye. You guys are acting pretty scary these days and it's even scarier when you don't realise it. The fact that I'm already receiving negative moderation for even daring to say that the US is less than perfect should be all the evidence you need that something is very wrong in the US right now.

Very, very, very wrong.

Francis Crick and James Watson, co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, were following up on a suggestion made just a couple years earlier by chemist Linus Pauling about the general helical nature of large protein molecules.

deliberately and repeatedly duped Internet users into downloading intrusive advertising software....(download PDF)

Oh, the irony. Acrobat Reader must be the most resource-hungry bloatware I've ever come across, and it displays ads, and has been used as spyware...

3 Cameras and a bit of plutonium aren't the only cargo onboard the probe.

THE first space mission to Pluto contains an unusual piece of cargo: ashes from the cremated remains of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered the outermost planet in 1930.

Firstly, it is impossible to get a job without a permanent residence status...This gives a good chance to all Australians to get jobs before any immigrants, who finish their degrees at the same time.

Second, There is a language/cultiral (sic) barrier...I can sense that if an employer is presented with two equally skilled job applicants he/she would choose the Australian.

Too true. A lot of people don't appreciate just how much M$ marketing manipulates language to achieve their aims. They don't always succeed but what they do accomplish can be saddening. Another way of framing and controlling public debate.

---

I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.

"Australias has to adopt DMCA under the Australian/American Free Trade agreement so I guess its a little late for this now though."

Laws are still interpreted by the courts. Currently the interpretation of the law by the High Court is that you are not bypassing copy protection unless you are making illegal copies. From the linked article:

In its ruling, the court said that while making a pirated copy of a game is illegal, playing a game using a "mod chip" is not. Mod chips, such as those installed by Stevens, allow PlayStations to play games from other geographic regions. Normally, PlayStations--like DVD players and other game consoles--can play only media made for a specific region.

Although this desicion is being reviewed by the Federal Government and new DCMA law changes are due in 1 January 2007, the changes will have "other exceptions identified under a legislative or administrative review as addressing a credibly demonstrated actual or likely adverse effect on non-infringing use." so it seems relatively likely that with our new fair use rights, the DMCA importation will be unlikey to make mod chips or DeCSS illegal, especially since the High Court has specifically stated that bypassing region encoding is not breaching copyright. "Apparently intentionally, those restrictions (region encoding) reduce global market competition. They inhibit rights ordinarily acquired by Australian owners," said the court in its judgement.

A friend of a friend recently came up with the idea of promoting beer by giving away dolls of a cricket icon (think baseball but slower) with large purchases of their product.

The TV transmissions of certain games sent out signals the dolls responded to, saying various more-or-less appropriate comments.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/sport/boonanza-for-thes e-fans-but-sport-too-fleeting-for-former-pm/2005/1 2/09/1134086812393.html

printer friendly version link
http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/evolution-whisp ers-secrets/2005/12/23/1135032186759.html?page=ful lpage#

I have a very positive emotional reaction whenever I see technology being used to defeat censorship from fearful totaliatarian governments around the world. This article describes how the current government of mainland China is struggling mightily to embrace information technology while at the same time censoring personal blogs. Their efforts are futile and I think that in 10 years you will see a very different system of government there.

2: We use all means at our disposal to locate terrorists and stop next attack. Terrorists caught or killed before being able to launch attack. I'm alive, but someone may have tapped my phone or e-mail.

Judging from past behavior, it is still not that simple. Looking at what Hoover did with the FBI's largely unfettered power to keep the reds at bay - I've seen how this can be abused. Proably better links, but for example.

Not that black and white...

 
The country I'm residing has done far more than mere wire-tapping and/or data-collection.
 
Please read this BBC report and/or this report from Australia .
 
See if it qualifies to be on the infamous 1984 list.

Thank you !

Alas ! That the same thing was voted in France a couple weeks ago...

• http://www.silicon.fr/getarticle.asp?ID=12133 (in French -- most recent)
• http://www.01net.com/article/288611.html (in French, still talks about it as a project)
• http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/french-antiter ror-plans-to-hit-cybercafes/2005/09/27/11275868285 90.html (in English, presents it as a draft -- oldest)

Bah, our Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, is best buds with the Bush administration, so what can a guy do ? :-(

ABC TV has...managed to survive with its current affairs programs intact, loathed by Labor and Coalition alike, as it should be. And as it should be, it still strives to put forward an alternative view. So that when the commercial media is dictated to by myopic intrusive ownership and ill-informed populism, is forced through thoughtless need to make irresponsible programs that lack both style and substance, caresses inflammatory and cheap, nasty demagoguery that seeks to marginalize the already marginalized, that describes the world in simple terms, provides simple solutions to complex problems and is purely a servant to fiscal outcomes, then the ABC will always seem to aggravate, annoy and frustrate and it's precisely when the ABC is doing this that it is serving its charter"

And the head of the ABC agreed with him! Said that the ABC's job was to cause discomfort to the comfortable, or some such seditious nonsense. There's already

Australia also has new Sedition laws, which ban you from critising the government. You are not allowed to "urge disaffection for the government or either house of parliament." Australia also has laws which let the government arrest people in secret and makes it a crime to report any secret arrests.

http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives//00 2970.html

Australia has no Bill of Rights in our constitution. The Government can do whatever they want to whoever they want. GOD BLESS AMERICA!

This is also a Cisco implementation... YMMV

At least you only cut off a finger. This guy took obviously thought sexual reproduction would now be a thing of the past.

Come to the Mississippi river area and tell me there's not enough water.

"Tough on drugs, soft on drug lords

[...] A leading opposition figure cites "the Singapore Government Investment Corporation's 1990s investment in the Myanmar Fund, controlled by Lo Hsing Han, one of Burma's most notorious drug lords, through his Asia World Company. Lo's son, Stephen Law, is married to a Singaporean and lives in Singapore."

.. and it's also a distribution that's been mostly making money - at least till October 2002 when I interviewed Patrick Volkerding, The interview is here.

"An exhibition celebrating the life of Charles Darwin...has failed to find a corporate sponsor in the United States because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution."http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/evolvin g-into-a-tricky-exhibit/2005/11/21/1132421603091.h tml

Personally, I feel sorry for the good Jack Thompson.

"... Help-desk staff were named as the worst
  offenders, followed by those working in
  technology start-ups, many of whom had
  continued to wear T-shirts to work as a
  consequence of the casual web culture
  of the '90s. ..." [1]

  `... More than 150 tech professionals
  attended a corporate fashion show in
  Sydney last night as organisers
  officially dubbed the industry "the
  worst dressed" in Australia. ... Short
  sleeved shirts, man-made fibres and the
  wrong coloured socks were some of the
  most common fashion faux-pas cited by
  corporate stylist, Melanie Moss, who
  hosted the event. ...` [2]

I reflect on this dressed in running shorts, Oxford blue shirt, vendorware tee shirt & black socks at my terminal. It`s a constant bone of contention to my better half who says I should dress a bit smarter. But I digress. I read an article a couple of months ago that confirmed my choice of dress.

It was by Kathy Sierra [3], who managed snare a ringside seat at the internal Amazon developers conference featuring Paul Graham [4]. This the only reference to this talk I have found. It goes something like this.... dignity is deadly ...

  `... When you evolve out of start-up
  mode and start worrying about being
  professional and dignified, you only
  lose capabilities. You don't add
  anything... you only take away. Dignity
  is deadly. ...` [5]

Reference:

[1], [2] Louisa Horn, `IT workers dubbed ``worst dressed``:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/11/17/11320169 09640.html?oneclick=true
[Accessed Friday, 18 November 2005]

[3] Dignity is deadly, `Kathy Sierra comments on Paul Graham talk to Amazon developers why worring about clothes, dress & unessentials detracts from startup based companies.`:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_us ers/2005/09/dignity_is_dead.html
[Accessed Friday, 18 November 2005]

[4] Paul Graham, `Paul Grahams website`:
http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html
[Accessed Friday, 18 November 2005]

[5] Dignity is deadly, Kathy Sierras take on Paul Grahams comments. Ibid.

"The great majority (90%+) of assaults are against one's spouse.
The great majority (90%+) of battered wifes does NOT separate"

I like how you state all these statistics, did you pull them out of your ass? In any event the issue is assuming that domestic violence is against women and women only:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/sharp-rise-in- sydneys-domestic-violence/2005/10/27/1130367990858 .html
>A surprising number of incidents involve male victims - outnumbering female >victims in cases were the victim is under 15 or over 39.

The rates of physical violence against both sexes by either sex are closer to being approximately the same than not in many cases. Here is a a few quick links, you may want to look at the biblography provided to cross check the stats as one should do with any statistics:

http://www.mensactivism.org/dv_flyers.shtml
http://www.mensactivism.org/search.pl?topic=dv

Do you have ghettos in Australia?

It depends what you mean by 'ghetto' but we do have a few high-poverty/high-crime areas. However they are only a small fraction of our inner cities so its not crime or anything like that that would drive people away from the inner city.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Sydneys-median -house-price-505000/2005/02/21/1108834709151.html


2) Do the suburban houses appreciate in value?

Yes, in Sydney we've just been through a huge property boom which affected apartment prices as much as houses.

WTF does IP law have to do with the $$$ actors/actresses are being paid?

Quite a lot. The privileged few in Hollywood would be paid orders of magnitude less and other artists paid more for a start if IP law was more rational rather than "winner take all".

Are you one of those people who believes that such "content" (music, movies, software, etc.) should be free to everyone, and that the producers of said content shouldn't be compensated for their work?

No, stop trying to deliberately tar me with the RIAA/MPAA piracy tunnel vision framing the debate. I did not say that.

Get a clue; the media industries aren't charities.

Nope, they're a cartel where a small number of media royalty are making an extraordinary amount of money at the expense of the larger population. Just like royalty in the middle ages who thought they had a god given right to rule over the serfs. Funnily enough the law was conveniently in their favor too.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/MPAA/RIAA abuse.

Internal memos from Philip Morris from April 1980 indicate that the tobacco companies have been fully aware of radioactivity in cigarettes for over two decades. They also knew of ways of eliminating the radioactivity, but wrote them off as a "valid but expensive point":

That phosphate fertilizer (specifically superphosphate fertilizer) contains natural radioactivity is a well established fact.

Natural uranium accumulates in the phosphate rock and has been shown to substitute for calcium in the rock structure. Uranium and its daughters are thus carried through the mining and manufacturing process and appear in the commercial product. Soils to which these products are applied show an increase in radioactivity over that naturally present and this increase is a function of the rate of application and the number of years that the fertilizers have been used.

M. E. Counts has shown that the specific [radio]activity [...] increases as the particle size of the superphosphate fertilizer decreases. Thus the smaller particles, which would be more likely to be made airborne by normal farming practices, would be expected to settle out on the tobacco leaves during the growing season and/or be more readily taken up by the plant root system.

210Pb and 210Po are present in tobacco and smoke. The Martell "Hot Particle Theory" has been addressed in the past and has apparently lost popularity in the scientific community (lack of recent publicity in this field). For -particles from 210Po to be the cause of lung cancers is unlikely due to the amount of radioactivity of a particular energy necessary for induction Evidence to date, however, does not allow one to state that this is an impossibility. (Ed: and of course, more recent evidence says just the opposite)

The recommendation of using ammonium phosphate instead of calcium phosphate as fertilizer is probably a valid but expensive point. What Martell appears to be suggesting is the purification of phosphate rock to obtain P2O5 or H3PO4 free of calcium (uranium and daughters) and inert materials. Preparation of ammonium phosphate for fertilizer would then yield a product greatly reduced in or free of the natural radioactivity present in the parent phosphate rock.

Furthermore, switching to indirect fire curing would eliminate virtually all of another carcinogen, nitrosamine, from cigarettes. Nitrosamine was previously found in BEER thanks to direct fire curing of barley. Switching to indirect fire curing of barley reduced nitrosamine in beer to indetectable levels. Yet Philip Morris makes Marlboros, cigarettes with more nitrosamine than any others in the world.

Yes, believe what Philip Morris says, because if you realized there could be a safe cigarette, it would cost them a lot of money...

Here's two simple manufacturing changes they could make which would eliminate the two most potent carcinogens from cigarettes. But I guess it's just cheaper for Philip Morris to kill their customers.