I agree with most of what you say and if you were to clarify stealing as "copying with the intention to keep and use content without paying", would agree 100%
I have a collection of music which to a large extent has been ripped to mp3 so I can play it on my phone. This is fine. I have also been given mp3s of music to listen to and if I like it, I buy it, if I don't I delete it. In this case the copyright owner benefits from what some would call piracy.
Using the media this way, only buying CDs (as distinct from copy protected disks which should be avoided) is fine. Downloading huge catalogs of mp3s without paying is, IMO, criminal in the same way that rustling cattle is criminal. The people that own it own it, and if you don't like their business model, boycot - to the extent of not having it anywhere in your possesion. Simple.
If you take into account that "Europeans" comprise many distinct groups, it's a bit hard to say that all "Europeans" came from one region in central Asia. I also wonder whether the distinction between Europe and Asia is really relevent when discussing genetic hisory. Perhaps Eurasia makes more sense.
That said, I have read a theory that Celts came from a region in what is now China and crossed Siberia and Russia into Europe. Interestingly enough, they then went and invaded Rome. This was all before Rome got organised, and started invading other people, so maybe this story shows a full circle. Then again, maybe the genes existed in China well before the Romans arrived.
It's also interesting to note that Australian Aborigines (I think all three racial groups) share the genetic trait of being the ability to have blue, green, or brown eyes and blonde, red, etc hair with caucasians. As far as I know, they are the only black skinned people who exhibited this before contact with Europeans. I'd be interested to know how this came about, whether the trait spread from Eurasia to Australia, or vice versa.
Re:spoken like a true crackpot
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
Whoo-hoo, that's a great idea! Now, instead of a single, central, easily regulated and maintained water supply we can have hundreds or thousands of separate water supplies, each with their own, probably increased, potential for contamination. Just think of all the new economic opportunities generated by the upsurge of water-borne illness and poisoning from contaminated water!
I really hope you're being sarcastic. In truth we should all be using a single, centrally controlled water supply. We should continue to buy industrial waste from China to poison our water in the name of dental health and everyone should be forced to drink it. This is clearly the only sensible option.
Decentralisation is wrong. Like allowing food to grow in public. What if something poos on it? Just buy the produce from the enormous chain which has been genetically modified to allow it to survice more pesticides and stop that felonious dreaming of a truly free society.
There should be a ban on all forms of decentralisation, starting with PCs. That's right, the internet is a network of reasonably powerfull computers that provides criminals and terrorists with unprecedented processing power to organise their next strike on your local bowling alley, so all right thinking people as a whole need to abandon PCs and replace the entire internet with a centrally controlled mainframe with a dumb terminal in every house. That terminal should include a camera or several as well as microphones. That way our benevolent beurocracy to ensure that the populace is not engaging in any autonimous or decentralised behaviour. And if this is not wholeheartedly adopted by everyone, then everyone should be locked up in fucking Cuba!
I just hate commies^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hterrorists.
Back to TFA:- Sounds interesting if it can work, having observed the recent high humidity over Melbourne, VIC, au that failed to condense until it was over the Tasman Sea. I won't be parting with any money until I see the details though....
Which doesn't change the fact that I can't find the claim in TFA. The assumption, however good or bad it may be, was used as a headline when there are plenty of good things that could be used for ligit headlines _and_ there are other high performance jvms. At the risk of starting a religious war, how does this stack up to BEA/JRockit on various architectures?
...then again "Fastest Ever" does sound catchier than "IBM adds OS Level Stack Traces". Nice marketing./
I'm sure I will download and use this jvm, but being the fastest is not the selling point. As a developer there is a lot more in this sdk release that warrants my attention.
It seems like./ eds or submitters making up crap to spice up headlines again. That's the nth time this week and I want my money back. I read TFA and couldn't see any claim to it being the fastest, although looking at the features there's plenty to make it interesting without additional./ marketing spin.
By the way, is it "fastest" as in it's stuck fast and not going anywhere, or did you mean quickest?
"The thing is, working in the music industry, if you aren't using Pro Tools, you really might as well not be in the music industry. It's sad but it's true."
I have low latency hardware ( say < 5msec ) with good S/N, good mics and premamps and I use ardour + jack + ladspa to record. I actually prefer Ardour to protools for basic multitrack recording and if my input and monitoring are adequate, so is the data I produce.
So if I stumble across some new sound that has that certain something and want to record it on my studio and send it to a mastering engineer to import it into protools and master it, I might should just stop before I begin?
Wow. Thanks, you just saved me a whole lot of time. I suppose any composers and song writers working on their creations should stop doing it the traditional way and get into developing algorithms instead. More realiable and repeatable that way. Cheaper in the long run too.
Hey maybe I can find some cute teenage girl and get her to mime "Ooooooh" to a 440 Hz sine wave from an old tone generator and put her in some sexy clothes and "create" the next big thing! Then way I could say "working in the music industry, if you aren't getting bimbos to mime to synthetic crap or screwing around with old Beatles recordings, you may as well not be."
...The best way to argue this case is to drop the FUD, and let the arguments stand on their merits.
But this is./!
Don't you realise that M$ will sue anyone who doesn't implement the entire OOXML spec, even those who aren't writing office applications _and_ every time you save a document in ODF M$ will kill a baby kitten?!?
This Ubuntu Studio thing has been discussed for a while now by people who acually use it to make music. Until this point it has just been tutorials and howtos on the wiki, but it's good to see them taking a step forward.
Audacity is a bit of a joke when compared to some of the other realtime goodies available on Linux, so there's next to no chance it will be the sum total of audio software on the distro. Assuming that these are people who just don't get it suggests you just read the./ summary and haven't browsed the wiki.
It is a shame there're no MOTU drivers available. Once everything is configured nicley I get much better performance out of Linux than XP on the same hardware. Maybe writing to MOTU and requesting drivers or specs may help, but I doubt it. I basically make sure that any hardware I buy has Linux drivers. If everyone did that, it would certainly change the market.
I'm pretty happy with this announcement because it will save me a lot of manual package selection and the hassle of configuring realtime permission, even if I have to remove audacity later.
True, but following up the same cod enzyme with a single hydrogen cyanide will completely prevent re-infection. Just imagine never having to worry about bird flue again!
Hey, just while you're signing that waiver, I'd like to let you in on a special offer I have on a local bridge. Great price, only one owner. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity...
I'd like to start by saying that these stories, when posted with summaries like the one above, should be moderated flamebait, or perhaps tagged flamewar for those with tagging abilities.
i've been a slashdot fan since 1997. seems like the submissions, and comments, are getting further and further left.
I've noticed a general shift to the right across society as a whole. Political groups that used to be happy to be seen as left wing are now trying to appear centrist and shrug off the "liberal" tag while groups that once were right wing are now openly fascist in character, if not in name. Once upon a time, insisting on the rule of law was seen as right wing, but now it's considered pinko liberal lefty hippy homo crap to suggest that members of the US administration should be tried as war criminals, for example, becuase they are in power and those in power are the winners who should not be questioned. Might is right and all. Go figure.
So I wonder if the apparent left wing bias on/. is because/.ers are still mostly balanced while the surrounding political climate is changing.
You have been warned. Any comment that suggests that the proud an illustrious leader of all the Universe as appointed by God almighty is motivated by self interest or a narrow political ideology WILL be moderated Flamebait no matter how amusing.
Maybe, given that it is a cell phone, maybe they could call it iCell? Marketing would love it!
Then again, looking at the interface and the way you actually have to look at it to be able to key in a phone number rather than just feel your way around, maybe they could call it iStrain.........would you believe iClaudius?
It was only after I bid that I noticed the "No pick-up, postage only" clause in the description. It made me wonder why a seller that was apparently less than 10 km away wasn't prepared to let me know what they look like or where they are, yet they wanted my address.
Then I realised the perfect scam:
1. Sell an item on ebay (possibly stolen).
2. Sell the item again, insisting on postage.
3. Hand deliver it, collect the $30 and getting a great chance to scope the house for a future break in.
4. Steal the item from the buyer.
5. goto 1
Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I was really happy when I lost the bid...
It's interesting to note how easy an anonymous place for selling goods makes criminal activity and refreshing to hear of some crooks being cought out.
Yes, but acadamia has to back it up at some point.
Yes but so often statements are backed up in a language that resembles political speak. That is to say that the point of the message is to reassert ones authority rather than further the truth. TFA is full of such statements.
How often throughout history have people had their toenails blown off while academics debate the extent of the risk of it happening? (metaphorically speaking of course)
The real message of this article is "People pay way to much attention top when celeberties say."And for some reason take them as experts.
I think the real message of Qbertino's post is "People swallow way to much of what academics say simply because they are seen as experts."
Ahhh, but you forget that scientists are the experts. So even if they are full of shit, they a right.
The sceptisism shown by Melinda Messenger in TFA is a perfect example of what is unacceptable in todays world. It is unacceptable not only because she has fake tits, provided by scientific research of the highest order, or that she is a celebrity, but because she is sceptical about technological advances that generate a lot of income and kudos for researchers and, lets face it, are kind of cool to tinker with. That makes her wrong.
That's the interesting thing about sceptisism. It's only valid if you are sceptical about things that are difficult to prove or unfashionable amongst the clique of people who are right. Scientists are of course the most right people around. If they had wanted most to be popular, they would have become celebrities. They didn't. They wanted to be right and they took the scientific route and earned a piece of paper. So don't argue.
There are scientists who used to recommend thalidamide to pregnant women. There are scientists who once said that there is no link between smoking tobacco and cancer. They were right then and they are right now, even if they have changed their position. To argue with them, especially in the language of a layman, was as wrong then as it is now.
It all makes sense when you realise right and wrong are just an agreement.
Re:Good going, France!
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I'm sorry, not sure if you're being sarcastic or offtopic, troll, redundant or what, but I gotsta bite....
Are you still a bit sore that France acted like a true friend to the United States and warned you about the blatant stupidity of the whole Iraq thing instead of being siccophantic like the UK, Australia, et al? Your comment is a bit like saying "Nice one USA, why worry about groups of neo-cons and fundamentalist christians destroying the fabric of your society and waging war on your constitution when you can genetically engineer prion free cows?"
The error margin is undefined and potentially very high. The whole model is based on observations that have led to guesses that have been backed up by more observations, but what if this whole doppler business, at least as it applies to light over interstellar distances, is really a bunch of zany space aliens playing with cosmic cellophane for example?
And how can anyone seriously claim to be "able to recreate in laboratories the conditions in the universe to within 10e-33 seconds of the Big Bang"? If all the tiny bits of stuff that make up the universe contain information about all the other stuff, and the universe is a lot bigger now with a lot more scattered stuff, and stuff is what defines the conditions, how can the conditions be anything remotely like they were at the beginning?
An observation like pushing one's bunny rabbit spoon off the high chair always causes it to fall on the ground might be wrong, but appear close enough to the truth to lead to a whole framework of belief, a framework throughout which this flaw is woven. And life may continue normally within this framework until one day one walks into a public toilet where the basin is not a basin, but a flat sheet of marble angled back towards the wall and one may suddenly suffer an embolism. It's like teenage a friend of mine who dismantled someone else's camera and then put it back together again. It was all going perfectly until he discovered the part left over. In the end it was no more than an expensive exercise that really didn't teach him all that much about photography
So if you are shown an open box full of furry mush and reeking of decomposed cat, how do you know there was ever a cat in the box? And who cares? The main point is to clean out the stinking box...
So basically, you think scientists are "special" and should basically be above any kind of government regulation. Thats so typical. You want to make the rules for everyone else, but not be subject to the consequences of the will of the people.
That's right. Science is simply an extension and justification of popular opinion. Too many of these elitists seem to think it's about objective study of the nature our universe.
I think the government hasn't gone far enough. All scientists should be denied funding until they provide conclusive proof of the existence and location of the Garden of Eden, our common ancestors in Adam and Eve and that God is white and conservative. Funding any research until that is done should be an offense attracting the death penalty. By public burning at the stake.
While we're at it, how come meteorologists get off so lightly? There's an example of elitism right there. From now on weather forcasts should always be for perfect beach weather in coastal areas, perfect snow cover in the mountains, and just the right amount of rainfall for the farms. All year round.
Ummm. That report commissioned by people who had already made up their minds and prepared by people who had already made up their minds. The current Australian administration is part of that old fashioned group of people who believe you can't have a working economy without digging crap up and destroying it, and the findings of the report reflect that - "if we can't use coal, we better find something else to dig up and burn or our stocks will plummet. Ziggy, make it so."
The low emissions for nuclear power stated in the report don't properly take into account the emissions from transport and refinement of fuel, especially the longer term proplem of ore quality degrading thus requiring more energy in mining and refinment. These estimates in the report have already been disputed.
The high emissions from solar in the report are largely based on the amount of energy it takes to manufacture photovoltaic cells. There are other more efficient ways to produce electricity from solar energy which are well suited to Australian conditions such as power towers and stirling cycle engines and biomass.
The report you mentioned is much like the Cole enquiry into AWB's practices in the oil for food program - the outcome was predetermined. Don't trust any report commissioned by the current Australian government, they are extremely corrupt and self serving.
If Australia was to invest the money required to build 25 working nuclear power plants into renewable energy, the same energy output could be reached in a fraction of the time (say 5 years instead of the 10 estimated in the report) with the added economic benefit of being able to sell the expertise gained to other countries. Plus, using renewable technologies that require human energy for maintenance could provide equivalent employment to mining.
But of course, we wouldn't be digging crap up anymore, and we wouldn't have those cool, "high tech" nuclear reactor thingies.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of what you say and if you were to clarify stealing as "copying with the intention to keep and use content without paying", would agree 100%
I have a collection of music which to a large extent has been ripped to mp3 so I can play it on my phone. This is fine. I have also been given mp3s of music to listen to and if I like it, I buy it, if I don't I delete it. In this case the copyright owner benefits from what some would call piracy.
Using the media this way, only buying CDs (as distinct from copy protected disks which should be avoided) is fine. Downloading huge catalogs of mp3s without paying is, IMO, criminal in the same way that rustling cattle is criminal. The people that own it own it, and if you don't like their business model, boycot - to the extent of not having it anywhere in your possesion. Simple.
If you take into account that "Europeans" comprise many distinct groups, it's a bit hard to say that all "Europeans" came from one region in central Asia. I also wonder whether the distinction between Europe and Asia is really relevent when discussing genetic hisory. Perhaps Eurasia makes more sense.
That said, I have read a theory that Celts came from a region in what is now China and crossed Siberia and Russia into Europe. Interestingly enough, they then went and invaded Rome. This was all before Rome got organised, and started invading other people, so maybe this story shows a full circle. Then again, maybe the genes existed in China well before the Romans arrived.
It's also interesting to note that Australian Aborigines (I think all three racial groups) share the genetic trait of being the ability to have blue, green, or brown eyes and blonde, red, etc hair with caucasians. As far as I know, they are the only black skinned people who exhibited this before contact with Europeans. I'd be interested to know how this came about, whether the trait spread from Eurasia to Australia, or vice versa.
Which doesn't change the fact that I can't find the claim in TFA. The assumption, however good or bad it may be, was used as a headline when there are plenty of good things that could be used for ligit headlines _and_ there are other high performance jvms. At the risk of starting a religious war, how does this stack up to BEA/JRockit on various architectures?
...then again "Fastest Ever" does sound catchier than "IBM adds OS Level Stack Traces". Nice marketing ./
I'm sure I will download and use this jvm, but being the fastest is not the selling point. As a developer there is a lot more in this sdk release that warrants my attention.
my $.02It seems like ./ eds or submitters making up crap to spice up headlines again. That's the nth time this week and I want my money back. I read TFA and couldn't see any claim to it being the fastest, although looking at the features there's plenty to make it interesting without additional ./ marketing spin.
By the way, is it "fastest" as in it's stuck fast and not going anywhere, or did you mean quickest?
I have low latency hardware ( say < 5msec ) with good S/N, good mics and premamps and I use ardour + jack + ladspa to record. I actually prefer Ardour to protools for basic multitrack recording and if my input and monitoring are adequate, so is the data I produce.
So if I stumble across some new sound that has that certain something and want to record it on my studio and send it to a mastering engineer to import it into protools and master it, I might should just stop before I begin?
Wow. Thanks, you just saved me a whole lot of time. I suppose any composers and song writers working on their creations should stop doing it the traditional way and get into developing algorithms instead. More realiable and repeatable that way. Cheaper in the long run too.
Hey maybe I can find some cute teenage girl and get her to mime "Ooooooh" to a 440 Hz sine wave from an old tone generator and put her in some sexy clothes and "create" the next big thing! Then way I could say "working in the music industry, if you aren't getting bimbos to mime to synthetic crap or screwing around with old Beatles recordings, you may as well not be."
...Or am I missing something?
But this is ./!
Don't you realise that M$ will sue anyone who doesn't implement the entire OOXML spec, even those who aren't writing office applications _and_ every time you save a document in ODF M$ will kill a baby kitten?!?
This Ubuntu Studio thing has been discussed for a while now by people who acually use it to make music. Until this point it has just been tutorials and howtos on the wiki, but it's good to see them taking a step forward.
Audacity is a bit of a joke when compared to some of the other realtime goodies available on Linux, so there's next to no chance it will be the sum total of audio software on the distro. Assuming that these are people who just don't get it suggests you just read the ./ summary and haven't browsed the wiki.
It is a shame there're no MOTU drivers available. Once everything is configured nicley I get much better performance out of Linux than XP on the same hardware. Maybe writing to MOTU and requesting drivers or specs may help, but I doubt it. I basically make sure that any hardware I buy has Linux drivers. If everyone did that, it would certainly change the market.
I'm pretty happy with this announcement because it will save me a lot of manual package selection and the hassle of configuring realtime permission, even if I have to remove audacity later.
True, but following up the same cod enzyme with a single hydrogen cyanide will completely prevent re-infection. Just imagine never having to worry about bird flue again!
Hey, just while you're signing that waiver, I'd like to let you in on a special offer I have on a local bridge. Great price, only one owner. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity...
And the singular for of wii wus.
I'd like to start by saying that these stories, when posted with summaries like the one above, should be moderated flamebait, or perhaps tagged flamewar for those with tagging abilities.
I've noticed a general shift to the right across society as a whole. Political groups that used to be happy to be seen as left wing are now trying to appear centrist and shrug off the "liberal" tag while groups that once were right wing are now openly fascist in character, if not in name. Once upon a time, insisting on the rule of law was seen as right wing, but now it's considered pinko liberal lefty hippy homo crap to suggest that members of the US administration should be tried as war criminals, for example, becuase they are in power and those in power are the winners who should not be questioned. Might is right and all. Go figure.
So I wonder if the apparent left wing bias on /. is because /.ers are still mostly balanced while the surrounding political climate is changing.
You have been warned. Any comment that suggests that the proud an illustrious leader of all the Universe as appointed by God almighty is motivated by self interest or a narrow political ideology WILL be moderated Flamebait no matter how amusing.
The 70's called and they'd like their feminism-and-every-inbalance-in-percentage-of-gend er-doing-X-must-be-manipulated-to-redress-balance back.
Shhhhh! George may be reading! Hang on, reading? Right you are, please continue....
Maybe, given that it is a cell phone, maybe they could call it iCell? Marketing would love it! Then again, looking at the interface and the way you actually have to look at it to be able to key in a phone number rather than just feel your way around, maybe they could call it iStrain..... ....would you believe iClaudius?
I recently bid on an item that made me wonder.
It was only after I bid that I noticed the "No pick-up, postage only" clause in the description. It made me wonder why a seller that was apparently less than 10 km away wasn't prepared to let me know what they look like or where they are, yet they wanted my address.
Then I realised the perfect scam:
1. Sell an item on ebay (possibly stolen).2. Sell the item again, insisting on postage.
3. Hand deliver it, collect the $30 and getting a great chance to scope the house for a future break in.
4. Steal the item from the buyer.
5. goto 1
Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I was really happy when I lost the bid...
It's interesting to note how easy an anonymous place for selling goods makes criminal activity and refreshing to hear of some crooks being cought out.
Ummm. Nokia is a Finnish company. At least Norway and Finland are close...
Yes but so often statements are backed up in a language that resembles political speak. That is to say that the point of the message is to reassert ones authority rather than further the truth. TFA is full of such statements.
How often throughout history have people had their toenails blown off while academics debate the extent of the risk of it happening? (metaphorically speaking of course)
I think the real message of Qbertino's post is "People swallow way to much of what academics say simply because they are seen as experts."Ahhh, but you forget that scientists are the experts. So even if they are full of shit, they a right.
The sceptisism shown by Melinda Messenger in TFA is a perfect example of what is unacceptable in todays world. It is unacceptable not only because she has fake tits, provided by scientific research of the highest order, or that she is a celebrity, but because she is sceptical about technological advances that generate a lot of income and kudos for researchers and, lets face it, are kind of cool to tinker with. That makes her wrong.
That's the interesting thing about sceptisism. It's only valid if you are sceptical about things that are difficult to prove or unfashionable amongst the clique of people who are right. Scientists are of course the most right people around. If they had wanted most to be popular, they would have become celebrities. They didn't. They wanted to be right and they took the scientific route and earned a piece of paper. So don't argue.
There are scientists who used to recommend thalidamide to pregnant women. There are scientists who once said that there is no link between smoking tobacco and cancer. They were right then and they are right now, even if they have changed their position. To argue with them, especially in the language of a layman, was as wrong then as it is now.
It all makes sense when you realise right and wrong are just an agreement.
I'm sorry, not sure if you're being sarcastic or offtopic, troll, redundant or what, but I gotsta bite....
Are you still a bit sore that France acted like a true friend to the United States and warned you about the blatant stupidity of the whole Iraq thing instead of being siccophantic like the UK, Australia, et al? Your comment is a bit like saying "Nice one USA, why worry about groups of neo-cons and fundamentalist christians destroying the fabric of your society and waging war on your constitution when you can genetically engineer prion free cows?"
Oh no, I see your point. Please continue...
What if light has been bouncing around for so long that the doppler effect has reduced it's frequency to the point where it becomes matter? Huh? Huh?
...adding lemon juice to rinse water gives glasses a cleaner, brighter finish.
The error margin is undefined and potentially very high. The whole model is based on observations that have led to guesses that have been backed up by more observations, but what if this whole doppler business, at least as it applies to light over interstellar distances, is really a bunch of zany space aliens playing with cosmic cellophane for example?
And how can anyone seriously claim to be "able to recreate in laboratories the conditions in the universe to within 10e-33 seconds of the Big Bang"? If all the tiny bits of stuff that make up the universe contain information about all the other stuff, and the universe is a lot bigger now with a lot more scattered stuff, and stuff is what defines the conditions, how can the conditions be anything remotely like they were at the beginning?
An observation like pushing one's bunny rabbit spoon off the high chair always causes it to fall on the ground might be wrong, but appear close enough to the truth to lead to a whole framework of belief, a framework throughout which this flaw is woven. And life may continue normally within this framework until one day one walks into a public toilet where the basin is not a basin, but a flat sheet of marble angled back towards the wall and one may suddenly suffer an embolism. It's like teenage a friend of mine who dismantled someone else's camera and then put it back together again. It was all going perfectly until he discovered the part left over. In the end it was no more than an expensive exercise that really didn't teach him all that much about photography
So if you are shown an open box full of furry mush and reeking of decomposed cat, how do you know there was ever a cat in the box? And who cares? The main point is to clean out the stinking box...
That's right. Science is simply an extension and justification of popular opinion. Too many of these elitists seem to think it's about objective study of the nature our universe.
I think the government hasn't gone far enough. All scientists should be denied funding until they provide conclusive proof of the existence and location of the Garden of Eden, our common ancestors in Adam and Eve and that God is white and conservative. Funding any research until that is done should be an offense attracting the death penalty. By public burning at the stake.
While we're at it, how come meteorologists get off so lightly? There's an example of elitism right there. From now on weather forcasts should always be for perfect beach weather in coastal areas, perfect snow cover in the mountains, and just the right amount of rainfall for the farms. All year round.
This is clearly the only way forward
Ummm. That report commissioned by people who had already made up their minds and prepared by people who had already made up their minds. The current Australian administration is part of that old fashioned group of people who believe you can't have a working economy without digging crap up and destroying it, and the findings of the report reflect that - "if we can't use coal, we better find something else to dig up and burn or our stocks will plummet. Ziggy, make it so."
The low emissions for nuclear power stated in the report don't properly take into account the emissions from transport and refinement of fuel, especially the longer term proplem of ore quality degrading thus requiring more energy in mining and refinment. These estimates in the report have already been disputed.
The high emissions from solar in the report are largely based on the amount of energy it takes to manufacture photovoltaic cells. There are other more efficient ways to produce electricity from solar energy which are well suited to Australian conditions such as power towers and stirling cycle engines and biomass.
The report you mentioned is much like the Cole enquiry into AWB's practices in the oil for food program - the outcome was predetermined. Don't trust any report commissioned by the current Australian government, they are extremely corrupt and self serving.
If Australia was to invest the money required to build 25 working nuclear power plants into renewable energy, the same energy output could be reached in a fraction of the time (say 5 years instead of the 10 estimated in the report) with the added economic benefit of being able to sell the expertise gained to other countries. Plus, using renewable technologies that require human energy for maintenance could provide equivalent employment to mining.
But of course, we wouldn't be digging crap up anymore, and we wouldn't have those cool, "high tech" nuclear reactor thingies.