He has a chance, if opinion polls are to be believed, and thanks to the voting system used.
Australian Senators are elected for a term of 6 years, with a half senate election every three years. There are 6 senators for each state. The voting is by a proportional representation variant of the single transferable vote system (called the ‘preferential system’ in Australia).
Minority parties need to get at least 7% of the ‘first preference’ vote and be able to agree to an ‘exchange of preferences’* with other minority parties to have a chance at a seat in the Senate.
Although Assange is domiciled overseas and under threat of arrest, he is still able to run for the Senate. Under section 20 of the constitution, a senator may be dismissed if he is unable to attend for 2 consecutive months and has not been granted leave of absence by the president of the senate. However, under section 15, his place must be filled by another member of his party, conventionally, one who was listed on the ballot paper but who was unelected. Under section 44(ii), he would also lose his seat if sentenced to 12 months or more imprisonment, but only if this was done by an Australian court. In this case again his place would be filled under section 15.
This new party would be best advised to stand a full senate team for each state and look to exchange preferences with other minor parties. The difficulty here is that the Wiki Party voters would probably also be Greens voters and the Greens might be hostile to an exchange.
*A complex series of deals to exchange votes on the ballot paper, but done openly and advertised in campaign literature.
Yes, i'm sure this audience will always quote that old hack Asimov but perhaps Mark Twain is better - "history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme". Humans respond to much the same situations in much the same way - emphasis on 'much', because there are always differences of culture, place and circumstance.
That is why we study history - to guide us in our own decisions. Do some research on Heine and Neitzche and the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrance which ponts to recurring patterns of human behaviour, not for metaphysical reasons but because of human psychology, economics, geography all joined in chains of causality.
A cheaper way of doing this would be to have a talk with any professor of history. Some can actually impart information clearly when they are not writing academic papers. Of course governments don't always like what they hear because it often shows that their short-term agenda will lead to long-term failure.
But tell me please - this baby boomer asks why do so few gen X and Ys show any interest in history? Yes, i know it's boring in school, but so are most things. Why is there so little interest in the past/ Have you not learnt that other people's past is your future?
Teaching is a collegial activity, so a good lesson plan would normally be shared within a staff room. Student's work is produced by minors where the school is 'in loco parentis' so their work would become school property to protect them from exploitation by adults, plagiarists and commercial interests.
That's how it works in Australia. Public school teachers are state employees so all their work is the property of the Crown. Good teaching material can be (and is) distibuted to other publis schools to give system-wide improvement. A teacher who gains a reputation for producing good stuff can negotiate this into promotion or a consultancy. State employees are not supposed to produce any paid work outside their job but in practice teachers who work as tutors, coaches or musicians etc are not imposed upon by the government as there is a tacit acknowledgement that teachers often need another income. Private school teachers' work is the property of their employee (diocesan office, school board) for much the same reason.
School administrators (puiblic or private) have a legal 'duty of care' to children. They won't stop parents from taking their kids to modeling agencies or auditions but if they produce something in school, say their major artwork for the matriculation exam, the school can arrange a professional exhibition and prevent students from beign ripped off.
American libertarians will doubt that government agencies can be benign (and if you want gold medal bastardry only a government can provide it) but not all countries have vast armies, huge spy agencies, heavily armed police or kill people with robot aircraft. The Department of Education will be staffed at policy and implementation level by people who believe in the value of education and teachers actually like children!
No. Australian courts, state or federal, do not claim jurisdiction outside Australia. Only web pages that affect Australians in Australia have the potential for defamation (local term - includes libel and slander by any media) and only Australian citizens or permanent residents may apply to the courts. The initial application would be for an injunction against the publisher (a take-down notice). It is not easy to get an injunction. A refusal to obey the injunction would lead to a civil case for defamation. Truth is a sufficient defence, but there is no First Ammendment protection (there is no Bill of Rights in Australia). A jury has to decide if the plaintif has been defamed but a judge alone hears the defence and decides any penalties, which would include penalties to a plaintiff if the publisher could provide a defence.
This is the second such case in Australia so there is precedence - quite robust in fact. Federal and state law treats web pages under the same rules as television broadcasts (yes....I agree....). Google would be considered a publisher since it presents the web page after a search. Untested as yet is the issue of linking to a page.
What a weird situation! Prostitution is illegal in the USA? If it is illegal for a woman to offer sexual services for money and for a man to buy those services then all those trophy wives and their husbands should be arrested. This will cause disquiet in the upper ranks of society. Less flippantly - laws against prostitution are a class-based punitive measure.
Where I live selling sexual favours has never, strictly speaking, been illegal. Soliciting for prostitution in a public place is illegal but brothels are legal because they can be regulated and have health inspections. There are illegal brothels but only because they break the planning laws and operate in a residential area.
And why should visiting a prostitute make it difficult to find a job? Cause hurt to their partner, probably, and make them the target of ribald jokes, certainly, but how does it impact on their employability?
And why do so many of the posts above accept this situation?
Lots of old books. Gruenberg on telemetry, the Radiotron Designers Manual, the ITT Radio Engineers manual, Skolnik on radar, the GE transistor manual and anything that shows actual circuits. You can always get modern books on theory but 1960s to 1990s books will give you circuits you can actually build.
Lots of components. You can buy in bulk from Chinese distributers using eBay and there is very little risk of counterfeits.
Good strong lighting. Loupe magnifiers. Fume extractors. Those devices that hold PCBs and components in place while soldering. Solid but comfortable chairs. Solid laboratory benches able to hold your test instruments and heavy equipment under test. At least 45 x 60 cm space on the bench.
Back in 1968 the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Australia operated proof-of-concept apparatus that did exactly the same thing. When I saw it operating it was a roomful of glass pipes that allowed the bacteria to live in their extreme environment and produce a gold compund that settled out and was collected there. Gold would have to be very expensive to make it commercial (and back then the price of gold was quite low), but it did work.
BTW, if you do the mathematics, the quantum wave function for gold is very similar to that of carbon14. And indeed at the heart of every gold nugget is a small speck of organic matter. Native gold is a finely dispersed suspension in granites and is usually not of commercial concentration. However, since alluvial gold accumulates in river beds the thinking at the Bureau was that bacteria were responsible for the growth of nuggets and that quantum processes played some unknown role.
CCTV cameras have been fitted to taxis in Sydney for several years now at the request of the drivers. The hope is that this deters robberies. Does it work? I have never seen any figures - does anyone else know? They have also been fitted in State Transit buses with newer buses having a least three. In this case while it does not deter theft or assault it does lead to convictions. Also some entertaining reality TV on the news each night.
Surely the conduct of examinations is the responsibility of the university or at least the faculty? Why does a lecturer need to be involved in enforcement?
I was involved in conducting examinations in schools (Year 3 to Year12) and universities for many years. Examination rules were usually set by the state Board of Studies or the university, but the rules I worked under can be summarised as: - scientific calculators are permitted, but candidates must demonstarte to the invigilators that memeories are emptied (usually by just switching the calculator off, or by removing the battery) - no dictionaries of any sort - mobile phones switched off - no PDAs or other networked devices.
Of course there were exceptions specified for particular exams, schools etc but in general they had to be simple and easy to understand given that the invigilators were usually retired school teachers and academics not always from the same subject area.
Calculators were permitted (actually they were mandatory) but the type was specified.
Foundation script was introduced to ensure that students produced a readable handwritten script and in the expectation that most future "writing" would be done at a keyboard. (Although I have spoken to Board of Studies people who deprecate keyboard skills, saying that we have to anticipate true speech recognition in a few years time).
US patent law is unique. Nigerian law is similar to most Commonwealth law; patent law is closer to European Community law. The same applies to reverse engineering. Just because its legal in the US does not mean that its legal anywhere else.
When Barber and Marshall produced the first working rail gun in 1976 (+/- a couple of years) at the Autralian National University their original intention was to produce a cheap launcher for small satellites. They passed the design on the Weapons Research Laboratory as that was the only Australian agency with any experience of launching satellites. The weapons people, true to their name, ignored the satellite potential and passed the design straight on to the US military.
The writer of this comment seems to be unaware that delta wings:
1 - predate supersonic flight
2 - predate jet engines.
During the 1920s and 1930 a large number of delta wing propeller-driven aircraft were designed. The most prolific designer was Hill of Westland-Hill (UK) whose series of Pterodactyl fighters is well-known by European aircraft designers. A number of German manufacturers also built delta-wing prop-driven aircraft.
Deltas provide a stable wing platform and have benefits in having low stall speeds. The drag they generate, however, combined with the low-power engines of the pre-WWII era, limited their performance. The combination of delta wings with jet engines overcomes the drag issue. Swept wing aircraft tend to "fishtail" in flight but deltas are "hands-off" stable.
A gliding reptile with configurable delta wings on its rear legs, a canard on the front legs and a long tail to provide stabilisation and manouverability would be a very active glider perhaps able to pursue prey in flight.
At the risk of being modded down, I will now violate three/. conventions in this reply: 1) I will address the larger issue raised her; 2) I will not speak in a narrowly US-centric viewpoint; 3) I will not attack other viewpoints by sematic arguments and hair-splitting.
The larger - issue: Emergency calls by VOIP raise predictable problems that are being addressed by competent telephone service providers. Most nations have an emergency number (911 in the US, 000 in Australia, 999 in Britain, 112 in France etc). Locating an emergency call from a wired connection is trivial - look it up in the database. Locating a call from a mobile is a little trickier, but you can narrow the call down to the base station and perhaps even triangulate from there. But a VOIP call could be from anywhere.
Most telcos are trying to find solutions and the ITUhttp:///http://www.itu.int/> have been sponsoring discussion on this. The obvious solution involves matching the IP address to a location, but dynamic addresses, NATs etc make this problematic.
Telcos report that 90% of emergency calls are hoaxes or misdirected. In some places the call centres are under-resourced, staff are ill-trained or lack language skills and may be located at a great geographical distance from the caller. Some genuine callers are foreigners with no local language, others are panicky or just stupid.
Voip also often suffers from dropped packets, latency or poor audio quality. There may be compatability issues with the PSTN.
The underlying problem is that VOIP is an evolving technology and the market is driving development. Emergency call centres are typical telco institutions designed for a structured, centrally-directed system where development proceeds at a leisurely pace - thats how the phone system has always worked. I predict that governments will start to mandate location-specific data for VOIP protocols to fix this.
"The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue. " Hypnotised subjects recognised the words more often than unhypnotised subjects.
The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
Also psych experiments use very small samples and have to use the repeated measures statistical technique. This can identify significance but is restricted in other information it can provide.
My guess is that its an analogue conputer, but there is a good chance that its a clock.
If you are familiar with Ptolemy's "Almagest" you know he models the solar system as a series of epicycles. Until Copernicus' time (and after) European and Arab teaching was that these mechanisms were the physical reality but Ptolomy never actually endorsed that view. What if the "Almagest" was the specs for a dedicated astronomical computer and the Antikythera mechanism is the implimentation?
Then again...clocks became simpler over the centuries. Our modern clocks only show hours, minutes, seconds and perhaps the date. Mediaeval clocks showed years, months, weeks, days and hours as well as planetary positions, seasons, and solar and lunar eclipses. Their mechanisms were more complex than mechanical clocks and watches (remember them?) produced in the 20th century. Mechanical clocks built in the 1970s were more accurate but less complex than mechanical clocks built in the 1270s in Europe. Clocks built in earlier centuries in Arab lands were equally complex. The Antikythera mechanism could have been just one in a line of astronomical clocks.
The Lucas Heights reactor is in the middle of a middle-class suburb. It's about 30 minutes drive from where I live. It's clearly marked on all road maps of Sydney.
You can drive by it, stop and look through the wire mesh fence. You can take photos and the guards will never see you. It is just not possible to conceal the installation form observation formt he road or nearby scrubland. If you call yourself a high school teacher, ANSTO will mail you brochures that would let you work out the floor plan. You can join a tour group or ask for a tour for your own group.
Lucas Heights used to be a desolate piece of bushland next to a military firing range, but then developers were allowed to build the suburbs of Lucas Heights and Barden Ridge there. Two schools a golf course and several sporting fields are only a few hundred metres from the reactor.
This bill is not a serious piece of legislation. Its just a chance for a minority party to grab some media attention.
Don't be misled by their name. The Democrats are a minority party. No seats in the House, and only three senators. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that this bill will pass; it may not even be read.
The Democrats are esentially an opportunistic party. If the Liberal/National coalition is in power (as is the case now) then they are centre-left. If the Labor Party is in power, they are centre-right. They never achieved more than 10% of the vote and get much less than that these days.
The US military has been interested since Vietnam.
on
Sensor Webs Unwire Ecology
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Sensor Webs and Smart Dust and related tecnologies will prove valuable in ecological studies and environmental monitoring, but that's not the drive behind them.
In Vietnam the US military attempted to install networks of sensors - seismographs, detectors for urine and sweat, detectors for nitrogen compunds (explosives), movement detectors, proximity detectors - along known NLF supply lines and for perimeter defence. They were put in place by Special Forces teams and transmitted their data to overflying aircraft for targetting. Often they were woeful failures or could be spoofed by the NLF.
Here is the new generation, just ready for "assymetric warfare".
The Canadian ruling is based on a precedent from Australia. In 2002 Joseph Gutnik sued Dow Jones for defamation based on a report on its Barrons website casting doubt on administration of his companies. Dow Jones maintained that their publication was in New Jersey and was protected by US laws and free speech principles. Gutnik claimed that the damage done by publication was in the Australian state of Victoria, where his operations are headquartered.
The Australian High Court (equivalent to the US Supreme Court) ruled in his favour. The Canadian court has now extended that judgement to Canada. My prediction is that the Australian ruling will now be used as precedent world wide.
US/.ers should consider these: most nations have nothing like the First Amendment or the Bill of Rights. In Australia, support for a bill of rights is confined to the political left with the (conservative) National Party and the Liberal Party both adamantly opposed to the idea and the Labor Party being lukewarm at best. This is a common attitude worldwide.
In practice, free speech on the web is unaffected, unless and until a government, or a powerful individual (these days "powerful individual" == "local capitalist") takes against a particular publication. Even then there's mirroring, archiving etc, so individuals might eb able to slip between the cracks.
But US media outlets are in for a surprise. Defamation laws in Australia and Canada are similar to those in many other nations and our courts view US media as irresponsible. They seem to be able to publish exaggerations, character assassination, half truths, assumptions, fictions and deliberate lies and claim protection under "freedom of speech". There's not much sypathy for that with juries.
UoSat is not a NASA satellite. It was built and is controlled by the University of Surrey (england to the geographically challenged). It carries ham radio gear and a store-and-forward repeater for NGOs in third world nations.
Looks like its back to the Cold War and its corruption!
In that period Australian secuirty services did not just keep watch on potential spies and traitors. Theyt regularly and willingly abused their powers to keep a conservative government in power. They were happy to destroy the careers of any dissident and to advance the careers of mediocraties they could control.
The police and security services also used their powers to settle personal scores and corruptly obtain personal advantage. It took years to put the broom through ASIO, the Commonwealth Police and the Special Branches.
There's every reason to believe that our allies used criminals and crooked police to carry out operations within Australia (Aussies - do a search on the Nugan Hand Bank).
Frightening though it is, the problem is not just authoritarian governments, but how corrupt officials wil (ab)use their power.
And for you Yanks, remember neither Australia, nor most other nations, have a Bill of Rights.
Slashdot Mirror
He has a chance, if opinion polls are to be believed, and thanks to the voting system used.
Australian Senators are elected for a term of 6 years, with a half senate election every three years. There are 6 senators for each state. The voting is by a proportional representation variant of the single transferable vote system (called the ‘preferential system’ in Australia).
Minority parties need to get at least 7% of the ‘first preference’ vote and be able to agree to an ‘exchange of preferences’* with other minority parties to have a chance at a seat in the Senate.
Although Assange is domiciled overseas and under threat of arrest, he is still able to run for the Senate. Under section 20 of the constitution, a senator may be dismissed if he is unable to attend for 2 consecutive months and has not been granted leave of absence by the president of the senate. However, under section 15, his place must be filled by another member of his party, conventionally, one who was listed on the ballot paper but who was unelected. Under section 44(ii), he would also lose his seat if sentenced to 12 months or more imprisonment, but only if this was done by an Australian court. In this case again his place would be filled under section 15.
This new party would be best advised to stand a full senate team for each state and look to exchange preferences with other minor parties. The difficulty here is that the Wiki Party voters would probably also be Greens voters and the Greens might be hostile to an exchange.
*A complex series of deals to exchange votes on the ballot paper, but done openly and advertised in campaign literature.
Yes, i'm sure this audience will always quote that old hack Asimov but perhaps Mark Twain is better - "history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme". Humans respond to much the same situations in much the same way - emphasis on 'much', because there are always differences of culture, place and circumstance.
That is why we study history - to guide us in our own decisions. Do some research on Heine and Neitzche and the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrance which ponts to recurring patterns of human behaviour, not for metaphysical reasons but because of human psychology, economics, geography all joined in chains of causality.
A cheaper way of doing this would be to have a talk with any professor of history. Some can actually impart information clearly when they are not writing academic papers. Of course governments don't always like what they hear because it often shows that their short-term agenda will lead to long-term failure.
But tell me please - this baby boomer asks why do so few gen X and Ys show any interest in history? Yes, i know it's boring in school, but so are most things. Why is there so little interest in the past/ Have you not learnt that other people's past is your future?
Teaching is a collegial activity, so a good lesson plan would normally be shared within a staff room. Student's work is produced by minors where the school is 'in loco parentis' so their work would become school property to protect them from exploitation by adults, plagiarists and commercial interests.
That's how it works in Australia. Public school teachers are state employees so all their work is the property of the Crown. Good teaching material can be (and is) distibuted to other publis schools to give system-wide improvement. A teacher who gains a reputation for producing good stuff can negotiate this into promotion or a consultancy. State employees are not supposed to produce any paid work outside their job but in practice teachers who work as tutors, coaches or musicians etc are not imposed upon by the government as there is a tacit acknowledgement that teachers often need another income. Private school teachers' work is the property of their employee (diocesan office, school board) for much the same reason.
School administrators (puiblic or private) have a legal 'duty of care' to children. They won't stop parents from taking their kids to modeling agencies or auditions but if they produce something in school, say their major artwork for the matriculation exam, the school can arrange a professional exhibition and prevent students from beign ripped off.
American libertarians will doubt that government agencies can be benign (and if you want gold medal bastardry only a government can provide it) but not all countries have vast armies, huge spy agencies, heavily armed police or kill people with robot aircraft. The Department of Education will be staffed at policy and implementation level by people who believe in the value of education and teachers actually like children!
No. Australian courts, state or federal, do not claim jurisdiction outside Australia. Only web pages that affect Australians in Australia have the potential for defamation (local term - includes libel and slander by any media) and only Australian citizens or permanent residents may apply to the courts. The initial application would be for an injunction against the publisher (a take-down notice). It is not easy to get an injunction. A refusal to obey the injunction would lead to a civil case for defamation. Truth is a sufficient defence, but there is no First Ammendment protection (there is no Bill of Rights in Australia). A jury has to decide if the plaintif has been defamed but a judge alone hears the defence and decides any penalties, which would include penalties to a plaintiff if the publisher could provide a defence.
This is the second such case in Australia so there is precedence - quite robust in fact. Federal and state law treats web pages under the same rules as television broadcasts (yes....I agree....). Google would be considered a publisher since it presents the web page after a search. Untested as yet is the issue of linking to a page.
What a weird situation! Prostitution is illegal in the USA? If it is illegal for a woman to offer sexual services for money and for a man to buy those services then all those trophy wives and their husbands should be arrested. This will cause disquiet in the upper ranks of society. Less flippantly - laws against prostitution are a class-based punitive measure.
Where I live selling sexual favours has never, strictly speaking, been illegal. Soliciting for prostitution in a public place is illegal but brothels are legal because they can be regulated and have health inspections. There are illegal brothels but only because they break the planning laws and operate in a residential area.
And why should visiting a prostitute make it difficult to find a job? Cause hurt to their partner, probably, and make them the target of ribald jokes, certainly, but how does it impact on their employability?
And why do so many of the posts above accept this situation?
Lots of old books. Gruenberg on telemetry, the Radiotron Designers Manual, the ITT Radio Engineers manual, Skolnik on radar, the GE transistor manual and anything that shows actual circuits. You can always get modern books on theory but 1960s to 1990s books will give you circuits you can actually build.
Lots of components. You can buy in bulk from Chinese distributers using eBay and there is very little risk of counterfeits.
Good strong lighting. Loupe magnifiers. Fume extractors. Those devices that hold PCBs and components in place while soldering. Solid but comfortable chairs. Solid laboratory benches able to hold your test instruments and heavy equipment under test. At least 45 x 60 cm space on the bench.
Back in 1968 the Bureau of Mineral Resources in Australia operated proof-of-concept apparatus that did exactly the same thing. When I saw it operating it was a roomful of glass pipes that allowed the bacteria to live in their extreme environment and produce a gold compund that settled out and was collected there. Gold would have to be very expensive to make it commercial (and back then the price of gold was quite low), but it did work.
BTW, if you do the mathematics, the quantum wave function for gold is very similar to that of carbon14. And indeed at the heart of every gold nugget is a small speck of organic matter. Native gold is a finely dispersed suspension in granites and is usually not of commercial concentration. However, since alluvial gold accumulates in river beds the thinking at the Bureau was that bacteria were responsible for the growth of nuggets and that quantum processes played some unknown role.
CCTV cameras have been fitted to taxis in Sydney for several years now at the request of the drivers. The hope is that this deters robberies. Does it work? I have never seen any figures - does anyone else know? They have also been fitted in State Transit buses with newer buses having a least three. In this case while it does not deter theft or assault it does lead to convictions. Also some entertaining reality TV on the news each night.
AVM may have good legal ground. The GPL does not correspond to copyright law as it existis in many countries so may not be legally enforceable.
Surely the conduct of examinations is the responsibility of the university or at least the faculty? Why does a lecturer need to be involved in enforcement?
I was involved in conducting examinations in schools (Year 3 to Year12) and universities for many years. Examination rules were usually set by the state Board of Studies or the university, but the rules I worked under can be summarised as:
- scientific calculators are permitted, but candidates must demonstarte to the invigilators that memeories are emptied (usually by just switching the calculator off, or by removing the battery)
- no dictionaries of any sort
- mobile phones switched off
- no PDAs or other networked devices.
Of course there were exceptions specified for particular exams, schools etc but in general they had to be simple and easy to understand given that the invigilators were usually retired school teachers and academics not always from the same subject area.
Calculators were permitted (actually they were mandatory) but the type was specified.
Not always. Many characters in Arabic are modified by the characters before and after them in cursive script and this is usually beyond most fonts.
Or at least in the state of New South Wales, where the Foundation Style is the script that has been taught in schools for at least 15 years.
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/parents/k6writing.html
Foundation script was introduced to ensure that students produced a readable handwritten script and in the expectation that most future "writing" would be done at a keyboard. (Although I have spoken to Board of Studies people who deprecate keyboard skills, saying that we have to anticipate true speech recognition in a few years time).
US patent law is unique. Nigerian law is similar to most Commonwealth law; patent law is closer to European Community law. The same applies to reverse engineering. Just because its legal in the US does not mean that its legal anywhere else.
When Barber and Marshall produced the first working rail gun in 1976 (+/- a couple of years) at the Autralian National University their original intention was to produce a cheap launcher for small satellites. They passed the design on the Weapons Research Laboratory as that was the only Australian agency with any experience of launching satellites. The weapons people, true to their name, ignored the satellite potential and passed the design straight on to the US military.
The writer of this comment seems to be unaware that delta wings:
1 - predate supersonic flight
2 - predate jet engines.
During the 1920s and 1930 a large number of delta wing propeller-driven aircraft were designed. The most prolific designer was Hill of Westland-Hill (UK) whose series of Pterodactyl fighters is well-known by European aircraft designers. A number of German manufacturers also built delta-wing prop-driven aircraft.
Deltas provide a stable wing platform and have benefits in having low stall speeds. The drag they generate, however, combined with the low-power engines of the pre-WWII era, limited their performance. The combination of delta wings with jet engines overcomes the drag issue. Swept wing aircraft tend to "fishtail" in flight but deltas are "hands-off" stable.
A gliding reptile with configurable delta wings on its rear legs, a canard on the front legs and a long tail to provide stabilisation and manouverability would be a very active glider perhaps able to pursue prey in flight.
At the risk of being modded down, I will now violate three /. conventions in this reply:
1) I will address the larger issue raised her;
2) I will not speak in a narrowly US-centric viewpoint;
3) I will not attack other viewpoints by sematic arguments and hair-splitting.
The larger - issue: Emergency calls by VOIP raise predictable problems that are being addressed by competent telephone service providers. Most nations have an emergency number (911 in the US, 000 in Australia, 999 in Britain, 112 in France etc). Locating an emergency call from a wired connection is trivial - look it up in the database. Locating a call from a mobile is a little trickier, but you can narrow the call down to the base station and perhaps even triangulate from there. But a VOIP call could be from anywhere.
Most telcos are trying to find solutions and the ITUhttp:///http://www.itu.int/> have been sponsoring discussion on this. The obvious solution involves matching the IP address to a location, but dynamic addresses, NATs etc make this problematic.
Telcos report that 90% of emergency calls are hoaxes or misdirected. In some places the call centres are under-resourced, staff are ill-trained or lack language skills and may be located at a great geographical distance from the caller. Some genuine callers are foreigners with no local language, others are panicky or just stupid.
Voip also often suffers from dropped packets, latency or poor audio quality. There may be compatability issues with the PSTN.
The underlying problem is that VOIP is an evolving technology and the market is driving development. Emergency call centres are typical telco institutions designed for a structured, centrally-directed system where development proceeds at a leisurely pace - thats how the phone system has always worked. I predict that governments will start to mandate location-specific data for VOIP protocols to fix this.
"The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue. " Hypnotised subjects recognised the words more often than unhypnotised subjects.
The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
Also psych experiments use very small samples and have to use the repeated measures statistical technique. This can identify significance but is restricted in other information it can provide.
My guess is that its an analogue conputer, but there is a good chance that its a clock.
If you are familiar with Ptolemy's "Almagest" you know he models the solar system as a series of epicycles. Until Copernicus' time (and after) European and Arab teaching was that these mechanisms were the physical reality but Ptolomy never actually endorsed that view. What if the "Almagest" was the specs for a dedicated astronomical computer and the Antikythera mechanism is the implimentation?
Then again...clocks became simpler over the centuries. Our modern clocks only show hours, minutes, seconds and perhaps the date. Mediaeval clocks showed years, months, weeks, days and hours as well as planetary positions, seasons, and solar and lunar eclipses. Their mechanisms were more complex than mechanical clocks and watches (remember them?) produced in the 20th century. Mechanical clocks built in the 1970s were more accurate but less complex than mechanical clocks built in the 1270s in Europe. Clocks built in earlier centuries in Arab lands were equally complex. The Antikythera mechanism could have been just one in a line of astronomical clocks.
The Lucas Heights reactor is in the middle of a middle-class suburb. It's about 30 minutes drive from where I live. It's clearly marked on all road maps of Sydney.
You can drive by it, stop and look through the wire mesh fence. You can take photos and the guards will never see you. It is just not possible to conceal the installation form observation formt he road or nearby scrubland. If you call yourself a high school teacher, ANSTO will mail you brochures that would let you work out the floor plan. You can join a tour group or ask for a tour for your own group.
Lucas Heights used to be a desolate piece of bushland next to a military firing range, but then developers were allowed to build the suburbs of Lucas Heights and Barden Ridge there. Two schools a golf course and several sporting fields are only a few hundred metres from the reactor.
This bill is not a serious piece of legislation. Its just a chance for a minority party to grab some media attention.
Don't be misled by their name. The Democrats are a minority party. No seats in the House, and only three senators. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that this bill will pass; it may not even be read.
The Democrats are esentially an opportunistic party. If the Liberal/National coalition is in power (as is the case now) then they are centre-left. If the Labor Party is in power, they are centre-right. They never achieved more than 10% of the vote and get much less than that these days.
Sensor Webs and Smart Dust and related tecnologies will prove valuable in ecological studies and environmental monitoring, but that's not the drive behind them.
In Vietnam the US military attempted to install networks of sensors - seismographs, detectors for urine and sweat, detectors for nitrogen compunds (explosives), movement detectors, proximity detectors - along known NLF supply lines and for perimeter defence. They were put in place by Special Forces teams and transmitted their data to overflying aircraft for targetting. Often they were woeful failures or could be spoofed by the NLF.
Here is the new generation, just ready for "assymetric warfare".
Gutnik versus Dow Jones
/.ers should consider these: most nations have nothing like the First Amendment or the Bill of Rights. In Australia, support for a bill of rights is confined to the political left with the (conservative) National Party and the Liberal Party both adamantly opposed to the idea and the Labor Party being lukewarm at best. This is a common attitude worldwide.
The Canadian ruling is based on a precedent from Australia. In 2002 Joseph Gutnik sued Dow Jones for defamation based on a report on its Barrons website casting doubt on administration of his companies. Dow Jones maintained that their publication was in New Jersey and was protected by US laws and free speech principles. Gutnik claimed that the damage done by publication was in the Australian state of Victoria, where his operations are headquartered.
The Australian High Court (equivalent to the US Supreme Court) ruled in his favour. The Canadian court has now extended that judgement to Canada. My prediction is that the Australian ruling will now be used as precedent world wide.
US
In practice, free speech on the web is unaffected, unless and until a government, or a powerful individual (these days "powerful individual" == "local capitalist") takes against a particular publication. Even then there's mirroring, archiving etc, so individuals might eb able to slip between the cracks.
But US media outlets are in for a surprise. Defamation laws in Australia and Canada are similar to those in many other nations and our courts view US media as irresponsible. They seem to be able to publish exaggerations, character assassination, half truths, assumptions, fictions and deliberate lies and claim protection under "freedom of speech". There's not much sypathy for that with juries.
Expect similar decisions as time goes by.
"Virus" is a fourth declension Latin noun meaning something like "force" (as in "money has great motivating force").
Singular - virus
plural - virus
Taking only the singular nominative case.
UoSat is not a NASA satellite. It was built and is controlled by the University of Surrey (england to the geographically challenged). It carries ham radio gear and a store-and-forward repeater for NGOs in third world nations.
Looks like its back to the Cold War and its corruption!
In that period Australian secuirty services did not just keep watch on potential spies and traitors. Theyt regularly and willingly abused their powers to keep a conservative government in power. They were happy to destroy the careers of any dissident and to advance the careers of mediocraties they could control.
The police and security services also used their powers to settle personal scores and corruptly obtain personal advantage. It took years to put the broom through ASIO, the Commonwealth Police and the Special Branches.
There's every reason to believe that our allies used criminals and crooked police to carry out operations within Australia (Aussies - do a search on the Nugan Hand Bank).
Frightening though it is, the problem is not just authoritarian governments, but how corrupt officials wil (ab)use their power.
And for you Yanks, remember neither Australia, nor most other nations, have a Bill of Rights.