Firstly, the OP's 'it's not that hard' was directed at Slashdot (which currently is only accessible via IPv4), not at the end user. Secondly he was talking about native IPv6 as he currently uses (he used tunnels at an ~earlier~ stage, and admittedly that does have quite a few drawbacks, but native IPv6 is trivial to get running under any vaguely modern OS).
I use the same ISP as the OP (Internode), and am currently still only running IPv4. But my router is capable of native IPv6 and I could use it any time I wanted... just need to sign up to their IPv6 trial. I'll just let the others do the trialing for me and switch over when they roll it out by default to their customers.
But all those routers that don't support IPv6 aren't physically incapable of doing so. They just aren't programmed to do it. A firmware upgrade adding IPv6 support should solve that issue. The router I currently have at home didn't support IPv6 initially, but they added it in a firmware patch some time last year.
Note that Australia currently has a minority government as described above. And by the slimmest of margins: 74 Liberal/National seats vs 76 'Labor + several random independents' seats.
Essentially, if even a single Labor member (or Labor-aligned independent) votes against the party line on a single vote, the Government loses. A very fragile, and very uncommon situation. I will be surprised if it lasts the full 3 years until the next election is due.
See Australia for a good example of where coalition government is relatively common. In practice, Australia is thought of as having two major parties (like the US), but one of those parties is in fact two parties (Liberals and Nationals) in a coalition. Usually just referred to as 'the Coalition'. The other large party is actually a single party (Labor), although they kinda operate in an informal coalition with the Greens.
I've lived in both Australia and the US for a long time and I must say the #1 flaw in the US system is that it is engineered in such a way that it makes a two-party state almost unavoidable. The Westminster parliamentary system though (UK, Australia, Canada, NZ etc) encourages third and fourth parties (and independents) to a greater extent, and allows them to have a valuable role even if they only comprise a couple of seats in Parliament. It encourages formal coalitions between parties, as well as informal cooperation. Proportional representation as exists in Australia also means voters have more choice (they can vote for a minor party, and that vote will actually mean something, not just be wasted).
I think the difference in the systems also has a role in explaining why US politics seems to be "two extreme viewpoints screaming at each other", compared to "multiple viewpoints reaching a middle ground/compromise" as is more common in other Western democracies.
Re the safety briefing: by all means if you are a regular flyer don't pay attention. I fly all the time, and ignore it. But they still have to do it: there'll be someone on most flights who has never flown before.
The one thing though that you SHOULD do during the briefing on every flight, no matter what, is note where the nearest exit is. This will be different for every flight and is the most crucial bit of information you will need in case of emergency. Seconds count - so knowing whether the nearest door is in front or behind you etc. matters.
The whole debate about whether phones ~actually~ pose a risk to electronic systems on the plane is moot. The ban is so you pay attention during takeoff and landing, and so you aren't irritating everyone around you during cruise.
Not to mention, the few times I have turned my phone on during flight (or forgot to turn it off, oops), I have observed: you CANNOT get a signal. I have not once observed any reception from cruise altitude on an airliner. Hell, you don't even get a signal at lower altitudes (say 10k-15k feet) while on approach and flying over densely populated areas.
So what's the point in worrying about it. The phone won't work during flight anyway. Some airlines are beginning to install picocells in the plane itself to get around this and will allow you to use data and SMS (but not voice) during flight.
Those same rules apply almost everywhere (everywhere I've flown to at least). Certainly it's standard in the US, Australia, and east Asia. You can talk on your phone basically as soon as the wheels hit the tarmac, while you taxi to the gate.
Exception: if you are on a small plane that requires you to walk across the tarmac and board via stairs (rather than via an aerobridge), you cannot turn your phone on until inside the terminal building.
I should point out that most of Australia has very low humidity for most of the year. So you get shocked by your car far more often than in many other places. It's summer here at the moment and I can tell you, I've been zapped every single time I get in or out of mine in the last few months. Not so much in winter when the humidity is higher.
Grounding straps on the back of cars are fairly common to see here in Australia too. Not just Asians. Increasingly rare these days but during the 80s and 90s you saw em everywhere.
2.x has a known serious issue that can lead to corruption of files, particularly JPGs. I got bitten by it myself and switched over to using Karen's Replicator (which seems slower but does basically the same thing), until SyncToy 3 was released.
- Something that doesn't rely on proprietary backup software. - Something that stores the backed up files 'as is' and doesn't do funky stuff like change the file names, rewrite them into unintelligible binary blobs or databases etc. This is related to the 'proprietary software' point above. For instance the built in backup tool in Windows is pretty good in most respects but I don't use it because it stores the files in such a way that getting them back without a copy of Windows is a PITA. - Something that requires relatively minimal human interaction after the initial set up. The more tiresome a chore it is to run a backup, the less often you are going to do it.
So my system is quite basic:
1. On the systems in my house, various 'important' directories (e.g. photos) are mirrored to my NAS overnight. Just a plain old file copy that rewrites files changed or added since the previous backup, and also replicates deletions (people advise against this but I'm usually careful about what I delete). I use a variety of software to do this: plain old rsync does the trick on *nix, something like Karen's Replicator or Microsoft's SyncToy works well in Windows if you want a GUI. My wife uses ArrSync on Mac OS to do this, although you could just use rsync from the CLI of course. You can set these to run as tasks automatically (every day/week/whatever), or do it manually if you are disciplined enough. I do it manually each time I do any significant changes/additions (e.g. each time I offload new pics from the camera).
2. The NAS is a cheapo DLink DNS-323 enclosure. Performance isn't particularly fast or anything but it's cheap and reliable (I'll probably upgrade to a higher end Synology unit or something eventually though). It has two drives in RAID1. So this offers redundancy: it is very unlikely I will completely lose the data on the NAS short of it being physically stolen or destroyed. The few times I have done something stupid on my main machine, the backup on the NAS has saved me. But RAID in itself is not a backup of course. So...
3. Every so often I pull one of the hard drives in the NAS RAID 1 array (while it's powered off, of course). It goes in the back of the car and dumped at my parents' place 10 km across town. While there I collect the HDD I left there the previous time, and when I get home, give it a quick format, and whack it back into the NAS. The RAID volume rebuilds itself and that is that.
Naturally this method has its flaws: it's not particularly automated, and I don't keep multiple revisions/versions of my backup, meaning that if I deleted a file a long time ago and need it back, I'm outta luck (i.e. I've done a full PC -> NAS -> parents' place cycle). But it works well enough for my needs. One thing I might start doing though is to keep hashes of important files along with the backups to protect from corruption over time (no point having multiple backups of files if the files themselves are corrupt!)
Hardly surprising is it? Rivers breaking their banks mean things that would normally be in the river are now in places other than the river. Considering the large amount of ~actual~ news coming out of the flooding situation, not sure why this random factoid above all others has made Slashdot. (Yes I know it's Idle...but still...)
Wivenhoe has done its job magnificently - I think you must have misinterpreted my post. I'm saying that thankfully this will only look like a 1-in-100 ARI flood. Without the dam, it would have been more like a 1-in-500 year or something. So you are absolutely right, it's unprecedented (at least as far the dam system is concerned).
No offence but that scenario would never happen in AU. Good efforts will be made to rebuild, just as they have been in every previous disaster (Australia is pretty accustomed to major floods, cyclones and fires). Australian cities are generally in a much better state of upkeep than in the US even before a disaster hits. (I'm not saying this in an inflammatory manner, but there is a LOT of urban decay in some places in the US, particularly the downtowns of rust belt/midwestern cities like Detroit.)
As an aside I am appalled that New Orleans is still in the state it's in. I'm an Australian but married an American and spend a good portion of my time in the US now. I cannot understand why the US seems to be such a nation of contrasts: how can a country which is wealthy and mostly filled with good infrastructure seemingly ignore such disrepair and decay in a major city? I'm pretty sure if a similar event happened to Boston or LA or Manhattan that it would have been rebuilt years ago. It's almost like different places in the US act are treated according to completely different rules or something...
Yeah unfortunately, although I'm Australian and we definitely have extremes in this country, the US midwest has us beat in any "rapid weather change" contest, by a long long way. The extremes in Australia can be just as extreme in magnitude... but they don't ~change~ as quickly as in North America.
Australia is comparatively insulated from sharply contrasting airmasses meeting each other because we are an island, and there is nothing but ocean between us and the Antarctic. So polar airmasses making their way from the Antarctic up to Australia are considerably moderated and warmed by the ocean before they get to us. Contrast America which has solid land all the way up to the arctic, which doesn't provide much warming (especially when snowcovered in winter) and thus allows airmasses to remain colder for longer as they penetrate southwards. So you can see day by day temperature fluctuations in America that are significantly more severe than in Australia.
On top of that, getting a canoe is definitely not good advice. The SES already had to rescue some moron who thought it'd be fun to canoe down the raging torrent that is now the Brisbane River earlier this afternoon. You are best staying away from flood waters in general as they don't behave in the way standard water in the river does...
The people in Brisbane know full well that certain areas are flood prone, especially those that lived through the 1974 floods. Seems that the current flooding is probably a 1-in-100-year kinda event so they got a bit unlucky. But everyone in these areas in Brisbane knows and accepts the risk.
As for the flash flooding in Toowoomba, well that's a different story. I find it hard to fault their choice of where to live. Far from being a flood plain, Toowoomba is on the top of a freaking plateau 700 metres above sea level, and nothing even remotely like this has happened in its recorded history. A freak event, and very sad.
Small correction... rainfall is measured as a 'depth', not a 'volume'. So *millimetres* is the unit you are looking for. Average rainfall of 100 mm equates to around 4 inches.
To put the rainfall SE Queensland has had in perspective, virtually all weather stations in the Wivenhoe catchment have recorded between 400-700 mm of rain in the last ~three days~. Some spots even higher (Maleny in the Sunshine Coast hinterland has 740 mm / 29 inches of rain over the last three days - that is a metric f**kton of rainfall in any language)
Very true. Australia is a first world country with good warning systems etc. so you would expect death tolls to be lower than in developing nations. (Having said that, most of the '78 missing' are unfortunately likely to be dead too - the flooding in Toowoomba was so quick that people were washed away before they knew what was happening and may have ended up many, many miles downstream, so it will not be until the water subsides that the true toll will be known).
There's one other thing about the low death toll that has nothing to do with preparation though. Australia is simply not as densely populated as the places you hear about with the multi-thousand death tolls. It's a huge, US-sized continent, with a tiny population. So just due to pure probability, most natural disasters affect rural areas and small towns. Casulaties are therefore usually low.
That's about to change though - the water is now heading out towards the coast, directly through Brisbane. Unlike the other places affected, this is a large, multi-million-person city. Now the flooding there will be a gradual 'river flood' over the next few days (not a flash flood like in Toowoomba), so people do have adequate time to get themselves to safety. But the ~impact~ of it will be immense just due to the fact it is hitting one of Australia's rare densely populated areas. I hope we get away with minimal casualties, but the economic cost will be staggering: so many roads, cars, bridges, telephone poles, signs, bits of telecomms infrastructure and all the other trappings that go with a large city will be washed away. It will be enough to put at least a $15 billion dent in the economy. And that's before we consider the private cost to individuals: it is expected ~9000 homes will be submerged in Brisbane by Thursday. Many of these people won't have flood insurance.
Not if it's cooked *juuuust* right. but 5 seconds on the heat can make the difference between undercooked, just right, and overcooked with kangaroo. Having cooked it quite a few times it's just too damn annoying to bother again.
Exactly right. Kangaroo is very very lean so even a fraction too long on the grill makes it incredibly chewy. It's damn good when it's done right (and healthier than most meats). But getting it right is so hard that it may never be a mass-market commercial meat for that reason alone.
I've cooked kangaroo 3 or 4 times and only once did it come out 'perfectly', IMO. Then again I'm a 28 year old male - my cooking skills are not what you'd call 'good';)
The Australian Parliament certainly is one of the more entertaining and colourful legislatures to watch;) It's quite endearing actually, although to foreign, non-Westminster-system eyes, it can seem quite uncivilised and chaotic at times. (For comparison, check out a video of the American Congress sitting... it's very, very polite and orderly by comparison - no interruptions, no haggling, no jokes at other members' expense, and no cardboard cutouts of the Prime Minister;)
This might have been accurate 60 years ago but modern Australia is a melting pot - comparable with the US in its immigration heyday. Today, over one-quarter of Australians were born overseas. Not merely 'have ancestors from overseas' - 25% were actually ~born~ overseas and have become naturalised Australians during their lifetimes. What's more, a full 5% of Australia's population is overseas at any given time, and close to 50% of people travel outside the country at least once a year. So the rate of people meeting and marrying overseas (and hence bringing back family) is higher than in many countries.
Hell I'm not even 30 years old and the population of Australia has risen by 50% just during my lifetime. That's almost entirely immigration-related (our natural birth rate would barely replace deaths).
In my workplace I can only think of 2 or 3 people who were actually born in Australia. The rest? Several Chinese, a few Indians, a Singaporean, a few Brits, a Sri Lankan, heaps of New Zealanders, and even a Canadian and two or three Americans. My wife (who is herself an immigrant) was stunned when she started working in Australia: "Almost everyone at my work is from a different country. There's like 20 different accents among 30 people!"
Anyway, point is, Australia is pretty multicultural these days and generally does a decent job of integrating immigrants into society. Not perfect by any stretch, but at least you don't get anywhere near the degree of 'people clumping only in their own ethnic neighbourhoods' as you do in some other nations.
Um what? This has no relevance to Australia, since:
a) we have public universal single-payer healthcare; and
b) even if you choose to have private health insurance, it has nothing, whatsoever, to do with your employer. You choose a company and buy the insurance, just like it was house insurance or car insurance. You can do it over the phone in a few minutes, no tests required.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, the OP's 'it's not that hard' was directed at Slashdot (which currently is only accessible via IPv4), not at the end user. Secondly he was talking about native IPv6 as he currently uses (he used tunnels at an ~earlier~ stage, and admittedly that does have quite a few drawbacks, but native IPv6 is trivial to get running under any vaguely modern OS).
I use the same ISP as the OP (Internode), and am currently still only running IPv4. But my router is capable of native IPv6 and I could use it any time I wanted ... just need to sign up to their IPv6 trial. I'll just let the others do the trialing for me and switch over when they roll it out by default to their customers.
But all those routers that don't support IPv6 aren't physically incapable of doing so. They just aren't programmed to do it. A firmware upgrade adding IPv6 support should solve that issue. The router I currently have at home didn't support IPv6 initially, but they added it in a firmware patch some time last year.
Note that Australia currently has a minority government as described above. And by the slimmest of margins: 74 Liberal/National seats vs 76 'Labor + several random independents' seats.
Essentially, if even a single Labor member (or Labor-aligned independent) votes against the party line on a single vote, the Government loses. A very fragile, and very uncommon situation. I will be surprised if it lasts the full 3 years until the next election is due.
See Australia for a good example of where coalition government is relatively common. In practice, Australia is thought of as having two major parties (like the US), but one of those parties is in fact two parties (Liberals and Nationals) in a coalition. Usually just referred to as 'the Coalition'. The other large party is actually a single party (Labor), although they kinda operate in an informal coalition with the Greens.
I've lived in both Australia and the US for a long time and I must say the #1 flaw in the US system is that it is engineered in such a way that it makes a two-party state almost unavoidable. The Westminster parliamentary system though (UK, Australia, Canada, NZ etc) encourages third and fourth parties (and independents) to a greater extent, and allows them to have a valuable role even if they only comprise a couple of seats in Parliament. It encourages formal coalitions between parties, as well as informal cooperation. Proportional representation as exists in Australia also means voters have more choice (they can vote for a minor party, and that vote will actually mean something, not just be wasted).
I think the difference in the systems also has a role in explaining why US politics seems to be "two extreme viewpoints screaming at each other", compared to "multiple viewpoints reaching a middle ground/compromise" as is more common in other Western democracies.
Re the safety briefing: by all means if you are a regular flyer don't pay attention. I fly all the time, and ignore it. But they still have to do it: there'll be someone on most flights who has never flown before.
The one thing though that you SHOULD do during the briefing on every flight, no matter what, is note where the nearest exit is. This will be different for every flight and is the most crucial bit of information you will need in case of emergency. Seconds count - so knowing whether the nearest door is in front or behind you etc. matters.
Mod parent to infinity.
The whole debate about whether phones ~actually~ pose a risk to electronic systems on the plane is moot. The ban is so you pay attention during takeoff and landing, and so you aren't irritating everyone around you during cruise.
Not to mention, the few times I have turned my phone on during flight (or forgot to turn it off, oops), I have observed: you CANNOT get a signal. I have not once observed any reception from cruise altitude on an airliner. Hell, you don't even get a signal at lower altitudes (say 10k-15k feet) while on approach and flying over densely populated areas.
So what's the point in worrying about it. The phone won't work during flight anyway. Some airlines are beginning to install picocells in the plane itself to get around this and will allow you to use data and SMS (but not voice) during flight.
Those same rules apply almost everywhere (everywhere I've flown to at least). Certainly it's standard in the US, Australia, and east Asia. You can talk on your phone basically as soon as the wheels hit the tarmac, while you taxi to the gate.
Exception: if you are on a small plane that requires you to walk across the tarmac and board via stairs (rather than via an aerobridge), you cannot turn your phone on until inside the terminal building.
I should point out that most of Australia has very low humidity for most of the year. So you get shocked by your car far more often than in many other places. It's summer here at the moment and I can tell you, I've been zapped every single time I get in or out of mine in the last few months. Not so much in winter when the humidity is higher.
Grounding straps on the back of cars are fairly common to see here in Australia too. Not just Asians. Increasingly rare these days but during the 80s and 90s you saw em everywhere.
Make sure you use SyncToy 1.x or 3.x though.
2.x has a known serious issue that can lead to corruption of files, particularly JPGs. I got bitten by it myself and switched over to using Karen's Replicator (which seems slower but does basically the same thing), until SyncToy 3 was released.
The key to a good backup system is simplicity:
- Something that doesn't rely on proprietary backup software.
- Something that stores the backed up files 'as is' and doesn't do funky stuff like change the file names, rewrite them into unintelligible binary blobs or databases etc. This is related to the 'proprietary software' point above. For instance the built in backup tool in Windows is pretty good in most respects but I don't use it because it stores the files in such a way that getting them back without a copy of Windows is a PITA.
- Something that requires relatively minimal human interaction after the initial set up. The more tiresome a chore it is to run a backup, the less often you are going to do it.
So my system is quite basic:
1. On the systems in my house, various 'important' directories (e.g. photos) are mirrored to my NAS overnight. Just a plain old file copy that rewrites files changed or added since the previous backup, and also replicates deletions (people advise against this but I'm usually careful about what I delete). I use a variety of software to do this: plain old rsync does the trick on *nix, something like Karen's Replicator or Microsoft's SyncToy works well in Windows if you want a GUI. My wife uses ArrSync on Mac OS to do this, although you could just use rsync from the CLI of course. You can set these to run as tasks automatically (every day/week/whatever), or do it manually if you are disciplined enough. I do it manually each time I do any significant changes/additions (e.g. each time I offload new pics from the camera).
2. The NAS is a cheapo DLink DNS-323 enclosure. Performance isn't particularly fast or anything but it's cheap and reliable (I'll probably upgrade to a higher end Synology unit or something eventually though). It has two drives in RAID1. So this offers redundancy: it is very unlikely I will completely lose the data on the NAS short of it being physically stolen or destroyed. The few times I have done something stupid on my main machine, the backup on the NAS has saved me. But RAID in itself is not a backup of course. So...
3. Every so often I pull one of the hard drives in the NAS RAID 1 array (while it's powered off, of course). It goes in the back of the car and dumped at my parents' place 10 km across town. While there I collect the HDD I left there the previous time, and when I get home, give it a quick format, and whack it back into the NAS. The RAID volume rebuilds itself and that is that.
Naturally this method has its flaws: it's not particularly automated, and I don't keep multiple revisions/versions of my backup, meaning that if I deleted a file a long time ago and need it back, I'm outta luck (i.e. I've done a full PC -> NAS -> parents' place cycle). But it works well enough for my needs. One thing I might start doing though is to keep hashes of important files along with the backups to protect from corruption over time (no point having multiple backups of files if the files themselves are corrupt!)
Hardly surprising is it? Rivers breaking their banks mean things that would normally be in the river are now in places other than the river. Considering the large amount of ~actual~ news coming out of the flooding situation, not sure why this random factoid above all others has made Slashdot. (Yes I know it's Idle...but still...)
Oh and /insert mandatory fricken laser beams joke here.
Er considering nowhere else uses CDMA, and it's a CDMA-only phone with no GSM fallback ... then no, it won't work outside the US.
Wivenhoe has done its job magnificently - I think you must have misinterpreted my post. I'm saying that thankfully this will only look like a 1-in-100 ARI flood. Without the dam, it would have been more like a 1-in-500 year or something. So you are absolutely right, it's unprecedented (at least as far the dam system is concerned).
No offence but that scenario would never happen in AU. Good efforts will be made to rebuild, just as they have been in every previous disaster (Australia is pretty accustomed to major floods, cyclones and fires). Australian cities are generally in a much better state of upkeep than in the US even before a disaster hits. (I'm not saying this in an inflammatory manner, but there is a LOT of urban decay in some places in the US, particularly the downtowns of rust belt/midwestern cities like Detroit.)
As an aside I am appalled that New Orleans is still in the state it's in. I'm an Australian but married an American and spend a good portion of my time in the US now. I cannot understand why the US seems to be such a nation of contrasts: how can a country which is wealthy and mostly filled with good infrastructure seemingly ignore such disrepair and decay in a major city? I'm pretty sure if a similar event happened to Boston or LA or Manhattan that it would have been rebuilt years ago. It's almost like different places in the US act are treated according to completely different rules or something ...
Yeah unfortunately, although I'm Australian and we definitely have extremes in this country, the US midwest has us beat in any "rapid weather change" contest, by a long long way. The extremes in Australia can be just as extreme in magnitude ... but they don't ~change~ as quickly as in North America.
Australia is comparatively insulated from sharply contrasting airmasses meeting each other because we are an island, and there is nothing but ocean between us and the Antarctic. So polar airmasses making their way from the Antarctic up to Australia are considerably moderated and warmed by the ocean before they get to us. Contrast America which has solid land all the way up to the arctic, which doesn't provide much warming (especially when snowcovered in winter) and thus allows airmasses to remain colder for longer as they penetrate southwards. So you can see day by day temperature fluctuations in America that are significantly more severe than in Australia.
Yeah he got his units mixed up - it's the same here in Australia (i.e. an accumulated depth measurement, in millimetres rather than inches though).
Refer to post above: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1945828&cid=34835426
On top of that, getting a canoe is definitely not good advice. The SES already had to rescue some moron who thought it'd be fun to canoe down the raging torrent that is now the Brisbane River earlier this afternoon. You are best staying away from flood waters in general as they don't behave in the way standard water in the river does...
The people in Brisbane know full well that certain areas are flood prone, especially those that lived through the 1974 floods. Seems that the current flooding is probably a 1-in-100-year kinda event so they got a bit unlucky. But everyone in these areas in Brisbane knows and accepts the risk.
As for the flash flooding in Toowoomba, well that's a different story. I find it hard to fault their choice of where to live. Far from being a flood plain, Toowoomba is on the top of a freaking plateau 700 metres above sea level, and nothing even remotely like this has happened in its recorded history. A freak event, and very sad.
Small correction ... rainfall is measured as a 'depth', not a 'volume'. So *millimetres* is the unit you are looking for. Average rainfall of 100 mm equates to around 4 inches.
To put the rainfall SE Queensland has had in perspective, virtually all weather stations in the Wivenhoe catchment have recorded between 400-700 mm of rain in the last ~three days~. Some spots even higher (Maleny in the Sunshine Coast hinterland has 740 mm / 29 inches of rain over the last three days - that is a metric f**kton of rainfall in any language)
Very true. Australia is a first world country with good warning systems etc. so you would expect death tolls to be lower than in developing nations. (Having said that, most of the '78 missing' are unfortunately likely to be dead too - the flooding in Toowoomba was so quick that people were washed away before they knew what was happening and may have ended up many, many miles downstream, so it will not be until the water subsides that the true toll will be known).
There's one other thing about the low death toll that has nothing to do with preparation though. Australia is simply not as densely populated as the places you hear about with the multi-thousand death tolls. It's a huge, US-sized continent, with a tiny population. So just due to pure probability, most natural disasters affect rural areas and small towns. Casulaties are therefore usually low.
That's about to change though - the water is now heading out towards the coast, directly through Brisbane. Unlike the other places affected, this is a large, multi-million-person city. Now the flooding there will be a gradual 'river flood' over the next few days (not a flash flood like in Toowoomba), so people do have adequate time to get themselves to safety. But the ~impact~ of it will be immense just due to the fact it is hitting one of Australia's rare densely populated areas. I hope we get away with minimal casualties, but the economic cost will be staggering: so many roads, cars, bridges, telephone poles, signs, bits of telecomms infrastructure and all the other trappings that go with a large city will be washed away. It will be enough to put at least a $15 billion dent in the economy. And that's before we consider the private cost to individuals: it is expected ~9000 homes will be submerged in Brisbane by Thursday. Many of these people won't have flood insurance.
Not if it's cooked *juuuust* right. but 5 seconds on the heat can make the difference between undercooked, just right, and overcooked with kangaroo. Having cooked it quite a few times it's just too damn annoying to bother again.
Exactly right. Kangaroo is very very lean so even a fraction too long on the grill makes it incredibly chewy. It's damn good when it's done right (and healthier than most meats). But getting it right is so hard that it may never be a mass-market commercial meat for that reason alone.
I've cooked kangaroo 3 or 4 times and only once did it come out 'perfectly', IMO. Then again I'm a 28 year old male - my cooking skills are not what you'd call 'good' ;)
Haha +1 funny (if I had mod points)...
The Australian Parliament certainly is one of the more entertaining and colourful legislatures to watch ;) It's quite endearing actually, although to foreign, non-Westminster-system eyes, it can seem quite uncivilised and chaotic at times. (For comparison, check out a video of the American Congress sitting ... it's very, very polite and orderly by comparison - no interruptions, no haggling, no jokes at other members' expense, and no cardboard cutouts of the Prime Minister ;)
Err what?
This might have been accurate 60 years ago but modern Australia is a melting pot - comparable with the US in its immigration heyday. Today, over one-quarter of Australians were born overseas. Not merely 'have ancestors from overseas' - 25% were actually ~born~ overseas and have become naturalised Australians during their lifetimes. What's more, a full 5% of Australia's population is overseas at any given time, and close to 50% of people travel outside the country at least once a year. So the rate of people meeting and marrying overseas (and hence bringing back family) is higher than in many countries.
Hell I'm not even 30 years old and the population of Australia has risen by 50% just during my lifetime. That's almost entirely immigration-related (our natural birth rate would barely replace deaths).
In my workplace I can only think of 2 or 3 people who were actually born in Australia. The rest? Several Chinese, a few Indians, a Singaporean, a few Brits, a Sri Lankan, heaps of New Zealanders, and even a Canadian and two or three Americans. My wife (who is herself an immigrant) was stunned when she started working in Australia: "Almost everyone at my work is from a different country. There's like 20 different accents among 30 people!"
Anyway, point is, Australia is pretty multicultural these days and generally does a decent job of integrating immigrants into society. Not perfect by any stretch, but at least you don't get anywhere near the degree of 'people clumping only in their own ethnic neighbourhoods' as you do in some other nations.
Um what? This has no relevance to Australia, since:
a) we have public universal single-payer healthcare; and
b) even if you choose to have private health insurance, it has nothing, whatsoever, to do with your employer. You choose a company and buy the insurance, just like it was house insurance or car insurance. You can do it over the phone in a few minutes, no tests required.