We only have one deliberately yellow light left in our house and that is a hanging chandelier directly over our dining table. I still have halogens in that and specifically for their yellow light. The yellow matches the candles and there is something intimate about it in that circumstance.
That said at the mounting point for the chandelier I have also fitted one of the flush mount white LEDS so 99% of the time it is in white mode.
As an aside that chandelier uses as much electricity when on as all my LEDs combined.... blergh.
No where to really do it, and when they do want to build a dam the environmentalists always manage to stop it. Go back 4 years and Brisbane was on the verge of running out of water, they were rushing the construction of a large desal plant and water recycling systems. The other big project was to be a dam on the mary river. But apparantly there is some endangered lung cat fish or something or other that managed to stop the construction.
I have replaced almost all of my lights with LEDs. For 90% of the house I actually replaced the whole fitting with flush mounted LED down lights. Each downlight cost me $36 AUD. (about 32 US) and produce 800lm. They look much nicer and gave my house a more modern look. On top of that I really like the light they produce. I know this is a taste thing but we went 6000k throughout. It takes a little while to get used to it (about a week or two) but now I find the "warm white / Yellow" to look dirty to my eyes.
On a power consumption side I have one of those electricity usage sensors in my meter box which gives me real time electricity consumption. When I turn those lights on they basically don't register on the meter at all as the bounce between readings is greater than their usage.
My electricity cost is 27c / kwh. So a 100w bulb will eat basically 65c per day (assuming on all the time). These use under 10w and are rated with mttf of 50,000 hrs. Even halving the life time I am saving $600 in electricity costs alone.
The cost here for drop in replacements is about $20. More expensive than an incandescent of course but they simply don't seem to fail. I fitted 9 of these during our update - 4 to hanging fixtures and 5 to a vanity rail.
And you would rather the state nationalising a private asset?
Like a shot. Vital infrastructure belongs to the country, not just a few shareholders. Privatising was a mistake.
I'm sorry that is just plain scary. It was privatised and the government got money for it. If you want it to go back into public hands then it has to be bought. People are what own Telstra. And so it is people who own the pits and the pipes and the cables. Nationalising it is just wrong and will absolutely destroy any investment happening in Australia. Just have a look at venezuela if you need an example of what would happen.
No chance of it being delivered under budget. I will stand by that sweeping statement until you can give me 1, and it only needs to be 1, large publicly funded project that was delivered under budget in the last 20 years.
At 37bn it is $2000 per person. At the more realistic estimate of 80bn it is $4000. No cost analysis was ever done on this project.
The NBN was a fiddly job. Every site is an active street with traffic. Every site is different. You are crossing the footpath and into private property on every single house in the country. My house for example would be a bitch because it is surrounded by a concrete drive, and has 2 retaining walls between the house and the road. So they would have had to cut and patch the concrete and rebuild the retaining wall. A small variation on the base set cost of digging a trench with no existing infrastructure but times 11 million properties and it adds up. Fast. There is no ability to use major machinery until you are outside city limits. It would be labour intensive and subject to millions and millions of tiny variations. On top of that they were trying to do it fast. Deliver on time, Deliver quality, Deliver budget - pick 2.
Yes. A major bit of the cost was Danegeld to Telstra to get access to the ducts that the taxpayer paid for not so long back (since Telstra haven't done much wired infrastructure since). Without that the cost would have been a shitload less. Simon Hackett of Internode wrote a few well reasoned articles back when the NBN ws proposed about how it couldn't possibly cost as much as proposed - but then it became clear later that Telstra had to be bought off.
And you would rather the state nationalising a private asset? It's amazing how much cheaper you can do things if you don't compensate people for taking something they own. They could build a brand new 12 lane highway straight through Sydney real cheap by your logic. I mean the land was originally the governments, they sold it for cheap and all people did was stick some buildings on it. Who cares!
Telstra didn't need to be bought off. The option existed for the NBN to install its own ducts and pits. This however would have been ridiculously expensive. Telsta not only had to agree to letting the NBN use its infrastructure Telstra also had to agree to turn its competing infrastructure off in the future. This was why money had to change hands.
Pick a state - http://www.adsl2exchanges.com.au/ calls complete bullshit on your 400m to exchange. At 400m to the exchange we would just use vdsl and the whole NBN concept isn't even needed.
Internet is not and never will be of the same criticality as power, water or waste treatment. To put it on the same level is patently stupid. You won't die without the ability to download something off the internet. Also internet connectivity can be delivered through multiple service streams. There has, to date, never been a single argument put forward as to why internet should be treated as a critical resource.
I'm not going to argue with you on figures because we will never know. All I will say is that I work in the construction industry and building anything in developed areas is painfully expensive.
Do you seriously think they were going to deliver the FTTH for $37bn? NBN co (the off books 100% government owned entity tasked to build it) was miles behind schedule, was running over budget at just 3 years into the build. The current senate estimates hearing has stated it as 2 years behind schedule 3 years in.
We would have been lucky to have gotten out at $100bn. Even Labor gave up arguing the 37bn cost as real in the run up to the last election.
FTTN is not perfect, but nothing in life is. Perfection simply costs too much.
As for you comments about the upgrade in speed. Firstly I believe off the top of my head it was 50mbps but even if it is 25 very few houses are close enough to the exchange to get ADSL 2 that syncs anywhere near that rate. If you are like me and on a digital rim and have a full exchange you only get 8mbps. Could be worse and you could be my neighbour who can't even get adsl because the exchange is full, lucky I'm nice and let him leach off me.
Finally WTF are you talking about re the CEO? Ziggy was in charge when the second tranche of shares were sold and they were highly valuable at the time. He finished as CEO in 2003 and was replaced by Sol Trujilio. Sol had an extremely combative relationship with the government and yes he saw battling the ACCC as part of his job. But even then he left the shares of Telstra high. The single biggest impact on share prices was Stephen Conroy who took to telstra with a baseball bat and even said “The regulation of telecommunications powers in Australia is exclusively federal. That means I am in charge of spectrum auctions, and if I say to everyone in this room 'if you want to bid in our spectrum auction you'd better wear red underpants on your head', I've got some news for you. You'll be wearing them on your head... I have unfettered legal power.” Conroy destroyed Telstra's value - no one else.
Don't get me wrong - I would love to have 1gb fibre to my house. But at close to $4000 for every man woman and child in australia it's too expensive and that's not per household it's per person. So $20k for a 5 person house, just for the connection. You still have to pay isp fees after that.
And NZ has a mutual defence treaty with Australia........ So NZ gets the benefits on Anzus. Also the "no nukes in our ports" comments look like they are being reversed.
Much better off just destroying the infrastructure and mounting a guerilla campaign operated from the major cities in the south. Nuking your own country is pretty much saying you don't want to go back any time soon. Make an invader stretch their supply lines from Darwin where you have destroyed the port and mined the harbour. Limited water, limited food, no supply dumps.
On top of that the invasion would have to come in the winter as most of the north becomes un-passable during the monsoon season. So you would really only need to keep them penned for 6 months before the weather did it for you. Trying to get from Darwin down to Brisbane, with a highly trained conventional army harrying you every step of the way, transport infrastructure gone, and in a 6 month time window would be extremely hard. If you don't make it you won't be able to feed your army because the US will be pounding the crap out of your seaborne supplies and Brisbane would represent the closest location you could hope to get decent levels of supplies.
We don't need to nuke our own territory to stop an invasion. Knowing that the US will be destroying your supply lines alone, irrespective of what damage the Australian Army is causing is more than enough.
Australia was very careful when it came to the non-proliferation treaty. No Australia doesn't have an active nuclear arsenal. However by testing a nuclear weapon we are allowed by the treaty to build them and we have maintained the capability. It is the reason (not the only one) why there is a nuclear power plant in Sydney.
Also nukes suck for anything other than sabre rattling and as for giving you a bigger voice on the world stage? I don't think so. I really don't see Pakistan leading the way and they have nukes.
The FA-18 super hornet that has been purchased to replace the f111s are inferior to the Migs that are being purchased by Indonesia (let alone China's airforce). This means that there is no way we could strike Indonesia or anyone else threatening via aircraft. So we would have had to had a ballistic missile program. This costs money and has basically no benefits outside of the strike capability. Much better off to have a carrier group paid for by the US somewhere near by and a piece of military infrastructure that the US would make sure didn't fall into enemy hands. The only reason the argue for nukes without the additional delivery mechanism is to say we would be willing to use them over our own soil if you invaded.
I would be far more surprised if Australia wasn't doing this. What's more there would be a real problem if they weren't.
In terms of potential conflict with another sovereign state Indonesia simply has to rank highly for Australia. It is close by, has a large military, and has a history of conflicts with Australia. The risk may be very very low, but like house insurance, the risks of your house burning to the ground are low but you still take out insurance.
Job destruction through automation implies that it can be done cheaper per unit of production through automation than through using humans. The net effect of this has to be that final cost of a unit of production goes does. This ergo results in more resources available at a lower price reducing the barrier to entry to other tasks that would otherwise be rendered too high a cost.
A person with $5 to spend has a greater purchasing power if everything is cheaper than if everything is more expensive. If you have a higher purchasing power you do not need as much in order to maintain the same standard of living.
Just because automation may, or even will, reduce the number of jobs in an individual industry it enable more jobs in the wider economy through making more things possible. Computers are a huge example of this. Computer made many many people's jobs redundant but computers have created orders of magnitude more jobs than they have destroyed in industries we never even imagined when computers first arrived.
Sorry, but no. I directly service the resources industry and there are way to many startup companies hitting easy to access reserves to say we are about to run out. No it's not the same as it was with pressurised reservoirs at shallow depths but this is exactly the same argument that was used to say that certain areas were mined out 100 years ago. Many of the precious metals mines that operate today operate where previous people thought they had got everything. Simply put they hadn't even come close.
We are much better at sucking stuff out of the ground than we used to be. We can do it faster, cheaper and easier than ever before. Yes all the truly basic reserves were tapped but the efficiency of old extraction practices were so low that people are now going back to old reserves and extracting far more than the original operator did before they declared them exhausted.
Lots of people much much smarter than I have identified proven and probably reserves that will keep the world going for a long time yet.
Rio Tinto has used autonomous trucks on some of its Iron Ore mines in the Pilbara region (north west Australia) for a number of years now (trials began in 2008). They also use it in conjunction with driver-less trains to haul the ore to the ports. In about April this year they announced that the driveless trucks had shifted 100 million tonnes of ore#1.
For those who think it will obsolete humans, I believe they are dead wrong. It will obsolete some skill sets, but not people. It creates other jobs and frees up labour resources for other uses. It is no different to the Scythe. Prior to its invention there was a much higher demand for labour to harvest fields, the scythe allowed the finite resource that is labour to be used somewhere else. If you believe self driving trucks will make people obsolete, what you are actually saying is that driving trucks is all that person is capable of. If that is the case I obviously have a much higher opinion of people than you do.
Will an off the shelf system meet the needs of your business?
You obviously already have a database that was built in house. It probably did what it was first meant to do well but scope creep over the years has totally destroyed the original vision (been there, done that).
Given that, could you feasibly do a re-write? Migrate to a better back end, to a better language. Can you break the current system into bite sized parts and convert them little by little?
Sugar, SalesForce etc etc etc are great IF they suit your business. There is one thing worse than a flaky database/CRM. It's one where your staff won't use it, so they have all gone to running their own spreadsheets.
If your management team is willing to invest in the project you have years of usage cases to draw upon and a 10 mile long feature list.
Because engine braking never works? Dropping a car into first will slow you up real quick. Might blow a gear box, lose control but you will wash off speed quickly. Chances of a kill capable closing speed with cut brake lines are very low and certainly not reliable.
Physical sabotage would require brakes disables, transmission locked into a high enough gear and throttle control. It would also then require it to happen when speed could be built up to a fatal level. Generally speaking most of us don't have a convenient cliff to fall off if we lose control of our cars. Generally we are in a suburban area at a low speed with lots of things to run into before going way way too fast.
Don't know what this says about me but I have been in an unfortunate number of accidents so feel I can talk about safety equipment through personal experience.... The most recent of which was being rear ended by a full size semi-trailer on a major 4 lane highway.
I was travelling in the flow of traffic at around 100kph. There was something on the road 3 cars in front of me (later told it was a large plastic crate) this caused those cars to brake hard. I applied the brakes, saw the prime mover catching up on me very quickly, let go of the brakes again to give him more time and see if I could dodge. To my right was a solid concrete barrier to my left the flow of traffic was travelling 30+ kph faster than me. I made the call that trying to change lanes would likely cause me to crash and go sideways (I didn't like my chances of swerving into a gap). So I decided I would have to let the truck hit me.
I hit the brakes hard, abs engaged and I stopped about 3m short of the other cars. I was then hit by the truck.
Air bags didn't deploy but I ended up with bruises across my chest from the seatbelt and across my legs where I kicked the dash. My wife ended up with sever bruising across her chest and internal bruising between her ribs as well as shin bruises. My 3 year old ended up with friction burns on the inside of her legs (5 point seatbelt harness), bruises to her stomach and black toes (she kicked the back of my seat). I also had a 12 week old in a capsule and she was completely unharmed.
The car was a 2010 E 220 Mercedes and it was totalled. The impact was severe enough that the rear windscreen exploded on impact. Insurance quote came in at $32k in parts alone.
The feedback from ambulance officers and service vehicle staff that attended was that we were ok for two reasons. First was the quality of the car we were driving, second was that we were all properly restrained. Airbags don't go off when you get hit from behind but we still had injuries from hitting things in front of us. If we weren't wearing a seatbelt I believe we would have been seriously hurt when hitting the steering wheel etc.
People should trust vehicle designers because they know better than we do when it comes to the motion of bodies in an accident.
Back on the autonomous drivers. If the truck had even had Volvo's autobrake system we would have been ok. But he was following too close. An auto pilot that can understand the effect on stopping distance of a load, the ability to accurately estimate the braking capabilities of other vehicles on the road, and faster reaction times. Yes please. I would really like to not have any more crashes please. Especially not with my kids in the car.
Oh and that position has nothing to do with the ANZUS treaty which when it was signed was critical to securing Australia's borders post WW2. WW2 saw the collapse of the British Empire, Australia's previous protectors, and Australia sustaining its first attack on its soil. Australia had neither the technology ability or the population to defend itself against the many potential threats that existed in the Asia Pacific region at that time. This situation continues to this day. At ~23 million people Australia cannot defend its borders without massive help. ANZUS ensures it has that support in the unlikely but horrific event that it needs it.
This has over time extended into extremely close military and economic partnerships between Australia and the US. Quite simply you don't tell your biggest military ally and third largest economic partner to fuck off when they are asking for public support.
Actually I've gone completely away from "warm" lighting in my house and have replaced all my bulbs with 5000k or higher LEDs. Firstly I replaced all the downlights with 5300k as they were an easy one to do. The replacement fittings cost me $35 each and are rated for 50,000 hrs (you can't replace the bulbs in these its the whole fitting). From there I replaced all the bulbs in the hanging fittings I had with selfcontained drop in replacements. These were more expensive at $40 each and I needed about a dozen to do everywhere. But again I went for 5300k. Now there is only one lamp that I haven't yet done which is in my WIR.
The effect is I now find the white "day light" to be the normal light. It took about a month to get used to it but now I find the yellow warm light to look dirty. The one light left in the WIR has the mental effect on me of being unclean. Don't know why I have that association but thats the way I find myself describing it.
I should point out though that the decor we have does have the effect of softening the light as well. Our house is pretty much tiled through-out but it's tiled with a hi-gloss porcelain tile that looks like a natural sandstone (yellow tone vs grey or white). And we have a lot of timber which also throws additional colour. The only place white just didn't work was inside of display cabinets where the cabinets were timber. It made the timber look incredibly cheap and nasty where as the yellow tone worked better.
The other nice side effect was during the day if it is a little dull inside turning on the LEDs actually makes the day feel brighter rather than feeling like you turned the lights on.
Slashdot Mirror
We only have one deliberately yellow light left in our house and that is a hanging chandelier directly over our dining table. I still have halogens in that and specifically for their yellow light. The yellow matches the candles and there is something intimate about it in that circumstance.
That said at the mounting point for the chandelier I have also fitted one of the flush mount white LEDS so 99% of the time it is in white mode.
As an aside that chandelier uses as much electricity when on as all my LEDs combined.... blergh.
Not 100% sure what you mean by up-right - I think you mean what we would call a floor standing light? ie freestanding pole with lights on it.
If that is the case then there are these available here.
http://www.northernlighting.com.au/products/2330-anders-led-floor-lamp-anders-floor-lamp-telbix.aspx
http://www.northernlighting.com.au/products/6030-arezzo-led-floor-lamp-100475-brilliant-lighting.aspx
No where to really do it, and when they do want to build a dam the environmentalists always manage to stop it. Go back 4 years and Brisbane was on the verge of running out of water, they were rushing the construction of a large desal plant and water recycling systems. The other big project was to be a dam on the mary river. But apparantly there is some endangered lung cat fish or something or other that managed to stop the construction.
I wish. Did a quick look online for the best kwh price in Queensland, Australia and it is 26.169c per kwh.
I have literally refitted my whole house with LED specific lights. In most cases they are a sealed unit where you replace the whole unit on failure.
http://www.northernlighting.com.au/category/48-led-lighting.aspx
They list heaps
More specifically I fitted c20 Ecogem S9041DL downlights - I went for the 6000k white because I prefer it to the yellow.
I have replaced almost all of my lights with LEDs. For 90% of the house I actually replaced the whole fitting with flush mounted LED down lights. Each downlight cost me $36 AUD. (about 32 US) and produce 800lm. They look much nicer and gave my house a more modern look. On top of that I really like the light they produce. I know this is a taste thing but we went 6000k throughout. It takes a little while to get used to it (about a week or two) but now I find the "warm white / Yellow" to look dirty to my eyes.
On a power consumption side I have one of those electricity usage sensors in my meter box which gives me real time electricity consumption. When I turn those lights on they basically don't register on the meter at all as the bounce between readings is greater than their usage.
My electricity cost is 27c / kwh. So a 100w bulb will eat basically 65c per day (assuming on all the time). These use under 10w and are rated with mttf of 50,000 hrs. Even halving the life time I am saving $600 in electricity costs alone.
The cost here for drop in replacements is about $20. More expensive than an incandescent of course but they simply don't seem to fail. I fitted 9 of these during our update - 4 to hanging fixtures and 5 to a vanity rail.
Drop in - http://www.northernlighting.com.au/products/5451-candle-3w-led-energy-saving-lamp-lca35-sunny-lighting.aspx
Down lights - http://www.northernlighting.com.au/products/4337-ecogem-10w-daylight-dimmable-led-downlight-s9041dl-sunny-lighting.aspx
And you would rather the state nationalising a private asset?
Like a shot. Vital infrastructure belongs to the country, not just a few shareholders. Privatising was a mistake.
I'm sorry that is just plain scary. It was privatised and the government got money for it. If you want it to go back into public hands then it has to be bought. People are what own Telstra. And so it is people who own the pits and the pipes and the cables. Nationalising it is just wrong and will absolutely destroy any investment happening in Australia. Just have a look at venezuela if you need an example of what would happen.
No chance of it being delivered under budget. I will stand by that sweeping statement until you can give me 1, and it only needs to be 1, large publicly funded project that was delivered under budget in the last 20 years.
At 37bn it is $2000 per person. At the more realistic estimate of 80bn it is $4000. No cost analysis was ever done on this project.
The NBN was a fiddly job. Every site is an active street with traffic. Every site is different. You are crossing the footpath and into private property on every single house in the country. My house for example would be a bitch because it is surrounded by a concrete drive, and has 2 retaining walls between the house and the road. So they would have had to cut and patch the concrete and rebuild the retaining wall. A small variation on the base set cost of digging a trench with no existing infrastructure but times 11 million properties and it adds up. Fast. There is no ability to use major machinery until you are outside city limits. It would be labour intensive and subject to millions and millions of tiny variations. On top of that they were trying to do it fast. Deliver on time, Deliver quality, Deliver budget - pick 2.
Yes. A major bit of the cost was Danegeld to Telstra to get access to the ducts that the taxpayer paid for not so long back (since Telstra haven't done much wired infrastructure since). Without that the cost would have been a shitload less. Simon Hackett of Internode wrote a few well reasoned articles back when the NBN ws proposed about how it couldn't possibly cost as much as proposed - but then it became clear later that Telstra had to be bought off.
And you would rather the state nationalising a private asset? It's amazing how much cheaper you can do things if you don't compensate people for taking something they own. They could build a brand new 12 lane highway straight through Sydney real cheap by your logic. I mean the land was originally the governments, they sold it for cheap and all people did was stick some buildings on it. Who cares!
Telstra didn't need to be bought off. The option existed for the NBN to install its own ducts and pits. This however would have been ridiculously expensive. Telsta not only had to agree to letting the NBN use its infrastructure Telstra also had to agree to turn its competing infrastructure off in the future. This was why money had to change hands.
Pick a state - http://www.adsl2exchanges.com.au/ calls complete bullshit on your 400m to exchange. At 400m to the exchange we would just use vdsl and the whole NBN concept isn't even needed.
Internet is not and never will be of the same criticality as power, water or waste treatment. To put it on the same level is patently stupid. You won't die without the ability to download something off the internet. Also internet connectivity can be delivered through multiple service streams. There has, to date, never been a single argument put forward as to why internet should be treated as a critical resource.
I'm not going to argue with you on figures because we will never know. All I will say is that I work in the construction industry and building anything in developed areas is painfully expensive.
Do you seriously think they were going to deliver the FTTH for $37bn? NBN co (the off books 100% government owned entity tasked to build it) was miles behind schedule, was running over budget at just 3 years into the build. The current senate estimates hearing has stated it as 2 years behind schedule 3 years in.
We would have been lucky to have gotten out at $100bn. Even Labor gave up arguing the 37bn cost as real in the run up to the last election.
FTTN is not perfect, but nothing in life is. Perfection simply costs too much.
As for you comments about the upgrade in speed. Firstly I believe off the top of my head it was 50mbps but even if it is 25 very few houses are close enough to the exchange to get ADSL 2 that syncs anywhere near that rate. If you are like me and on a digital rim and have a full exchange you only get 8mbps. Could be worse and you could be my neighbour who can't even get adsl because the exchange is full, lucky I'm nice and let him leach off me.
Finally WTF are you talking about re the CEO? Ziggy was in charge when the second tranche of shares were sold and they were highly valuable at the time. He finished as CEO in 2003 and was replaced by Sol Trujilio. Sol had an extremely combative relationship with the government and yes he saw battling the ACCC as part of his job. But even then he left the shares of Telstra high. The single biggest impact on share prices was Stephen Conroy who took to telstra with a baseball bat and even said “The regulation of telecommunications powers in Australia is exclusively federal. That means I am in charge of spectrum auctions, and if I say to everyone in this room 'if you want to bid in our spectrum auction you'd better wear red underpants on your head', I've got some news for you. You'll be wearing them on your head ... I have unfettered legal power.” Conroy destroyed Telstra's value - no one else.
Don't get me wrong - I would love to have 1gb fibre to my house. But at close to $4000 for every man woman and child in australia it's too expensive and that's not per household it's per person. So $20k for a 5 person house, just for the connection. You still have to pay isp fees after that.
Outside of being crap it even contains what I would have thought would have killed any article on Slashdot "FoxNews.com has learned."
How do I down vote an article?!?!?
And NZ has a mutual defence treaty with Australia........ So NZ gets the benefits on Anzus. Also the "no nukes in our ports" comments look like they are being reversed.
Much better off just destroying the infrastructure and mounting a guerilla campaign operated from the major cities in the south. Nuking your own country is pretty much saying you don't want to go back any time soon. Make an invader stretch their supply lines from Darwin where you have destroyed the port and mined the harbour. Limited water, limited food, no supply dumps.
On top of that the invasion would have to come in the winter as most of the north becomes un-passable during the monsoon season. So you would really only need to keep them penned for 6 months before the weather did it for you. Trying to get from Darwin down to Brisbane, with a highly trained conventional army harrying you every step of the way, transport infrastructure gone, and in a 6 month time window would be extremely hard. If you don't make it you won't be able to feed your army because the US will be pounding the crap out of your seaborne supplies and Brisbane would represent the closest location you could hope to get decent levels of supplies.
We don't need to nuke our own territory to stop an invasion. Knowing that the US will be destroying your supply lines alone, irrespective of what damage the Australian Army is causing is more than enough.
Australia was very careful when it came to the non-proliferation treaty. No Australia doesn't have an active nuclear arsenal. However by testing a nuclear weapon we are allowed by the treaty to build them and we have maintained the capability. It is the reason (not the only one) why there is a nuclear power plant in Sydney.
Also nukes suck for anything other than sabre rattling and as for giving you a bigger voice on the world stage? I don't think so. I really don't see Pakistan leading the way and they have nukes.
The FA-18 super hornet that has been purchased to replace the f111s are inferior to the Migs that are being purchased by Indonesia (let alone China's airforce). This means that there is no way we could strike Indonesia or anyone else threatening via aircraft. So we would have had to had a ballistic missile program. This costs money and has basically no benefits outside of the strike capability. Much better off to have a carrier group paid for by the US somewhere near by and a piece of military infrastructure that the US would make sure didn't fall into enemy hands. The only reason the argue for nukes without the additional delivery mechanism is to say we would be willing to use them over our own soil if you invaded.
Yes australia did. Its called Anzus. Perhaps one of the biggest treaty coupes in Australias history.
Despite what people may think australia cannot defend itself without support. America is the ONLY logical source of that support.
I would be far more surprised if Australia wasn't doing this. What's more there would be a real problem if they weren't.
In terms of potential conflict with another sovereign state Indonesia simply has to rank highly for Australia. It is close by, has a large military, and has a history of conflicts with Australia. The risk may be very very low, but like house insurance, the risks of your house burning to the ground are low but you still take out insurance.
Job destruction through automation implies that it can be done cheaper per unit of production through automation than through using humans. The net effect of this has to be that final cost of a unit of production goes does. This ergo results in more resources available at a lower price reducing the barrier to entry to other tasks that would otherwise be rendered too high a cost.
A person with $5 to spend has a greater purchasing power if everything is cheaper than if everything is more expensive. If you have a higher purchasing power you do not need as much in order to maintain the same standard of living.
Just because automation may, or even will, reduce the number of jobs in an individual industry it enable more jobs in the wider economy through making more things possible. Computers are a huge example of this. Computer made many many people's jobs redundant but computers have created orders of magnitude more jobs than they have destroyed in industries we never even imagined when computers first arrived.
Sorry, but no. I directly service the resources industry and there are way to many startup companies hitting easy to access reserves to say we are about to run out. No it's not the same as it was with pressurised reservoirs at shallow depths but this is exactly the same argument that was used to say that certain areas were mined out 100 years ago. Many of the precious metals mines that operate today operate where previous people thought they had got everything. Simply put they hadn't even come close.
We are much better at sucking stuff out of the ground than we used to be. We can do it faster, cheaper and easier than ever before. Yes all the truly basic reserves were tapped but the efficiency of old extraction practices were so low that people are now going back to old reserves and extracting far more than the original operator did before they declared them exhausted.
Lots of people much much smarter than I have identified proven and probably reserves that will keep the world going for a long time yet.
Rio Tinto has used autonomous trucks on some of its Iron Ore mines in the Pilbara region (north west Australia) for a number of years now (trials began in 2008). They also use it in conjunction with driver-less trains to haul the ore to the ports. In about April this year they announced that the driveless trucks had shifted 100 million tonnes of ore#1.
For those who think it will obsolete humans, I believe they are dead wrong. It will obsolete some skill sets, but not people. It creates other jobs and frees up labour resources for other uses. It is no different to the Scythe. Prior to its invention there was a much higher demand for labour to harvest fields, the scythe allowed the finite resource that is labour to be used somewhere else. If you believe self driving trucks will make people obsolete, what you are actually saying is that driving trucks is all that person is capable of. If that is the case I obviously have a much higher opinion of people than you do.
1 - http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/news/rio-s-driverless-trucks-move-100-million-tonnes
Will an off the shelf system meet the needs of your business?
You obviously already have a database that was built in house. It probably did what it was first meant to do well but scope creep over the years has totally destroyed the original vision (been there, done that).
Given that, could you feasibly do a re-write? Migrate to a better back end, to a better language. Can you break the current system into bite sized parts and convert them little by little?
Sugar, SalesForce etc etc etc are great IF they suit your business. There is one thing worse than a flaky database/CRM. It's one where your staff won't use it, so they have all gone to running their own spreadsheets.
If your management team is willing to invest in the project you have years of usage cases to draw upon and a 10 mile long feature list.
Because engine braking never works? Dropping a car into first will slow you up real quick. Might blow a gear box, lose control but you will wash off speed quickly. Chances of a kill capable closing speed with cut brake lines are very low and certainly not reliable.
Physical sabotage would require brakes disables, transmission locked into a high enough gear and throttle control. It would also then require it to happen when speed could be built up to a fatal level. Generally speaking most of us don't have a convenient cliff to fall off if we lose control of our cars. Generally we are in a suburban area at a low speed with lots of things to run into before going way way too fast.
Don't know what this says about me but I have been in an unfortunate number of accidents so feel I can talk about safety equipment through personal experience.... The most recent of which was being rear ended by a full size semi-trailer on a major 4 lane highway.
I was travelling in the flow of traffic at around 100kph. There was something on the road 3 cars in front of me (later told it was a large plastic crate) this caused those cars to brake hard. I applied the brakes, saw the prime mover catching up on me very quickly, let go of the brakes again to give him more time and see if I could dodge. To my right was a solid concrete barrier to my left the flow of traffic was travelling 30+ kph faster than me. I made the call that trying to change lanes would likely cause me to crash and go sideways (I didn't like my chances of swerving into a gap). So I decided I would have to let the truck hit me.
I hit the brakes hard, abs engaged and I stopped about 3m short of the other cars. I was then hit by the truck.
Air bags didn't deploy but I ended up with bruises across my chest from the seatbelt and across my legs where I kicked the dash. My wife ended up with sever bruising across her chest and internal bruising between her ribs as well as shin bruises. My 3 year old ended up with friction burns on the inside of her legs (5 point seatbelt harness), bruises to her stomach and black toes (she kicked the back of my seat). I also had a 12 week old in a capsule and she was completely unharmed.
The car was a 2010 E 220 Mercedes and it was totalled. The impact was severe enough that the rear windscreen exploded on impact. Insurance quote came in at $32k in parts alone.
The feedback from ambulance officers and service vehicle staff that attended was that we were ok for two reasons. First was the quality of the car we were driving, second was that we were all properly restrained. Airbags don't go off when you get hit from behind but we still had injuries from hitting things in front of us. If we weren't wearing a seatbelt I believe we would have been seriously hurt when hitting the steering wheel etc.
People should trust vehicle designers because they know better than we do when it comes to the motion of bodies in an accident.
Back on the autonomous drivers. If the truck had even had Volvo's autobrake system we would have been ok. But he was following too close. An auto pilot that can understand the effect on stopping distance of a load, the ability to accurately estimate the braking capabilities of other vehicles on the road, and faster reaction times. Yes please. I would really like to not have any more crashes please. Especially not with my kids in the car.
Oh and that position has nothing to do with the ANZUS treaty which when it was signed was critical to securing Australia's borders post WW2. WW2 saw the collapse of the British Empire, Australia's previous protectors, and Australia sustaining its first attack on its soil. Australia had neither the technology ability or the population to defend itself against the many potential threats that existed in the Asia Pacific region at that time. This situation continues to this day. At ~23 million people Australia cannot defend its borders without massive help. ANZUS ensures it has that support in the unlikely but horrific event that it needs it.
This has over time extended into extremely close military and economic partnerships between Australia and the US. Quite simply you don't tell your biggest military ally and third largest economic partner to fuck off when they are asking for public support.
Actually I've gone completely away from "warm" lighting in my house and have replaced all my bulbs with 5000k or higher LEDs. Firstly I replaced all the downlights with 5300k as they were an easy one to do. The replacement fittings cost me $35 each and are rated for 50,000 hrs (you can't replace the bulbs in these its the whole fitting). From there I replaced all the bulbs in the hanging fittings I had with selfcontained drop in replacements. These were more expensive at $40 each and I needed about a dozen to do everywhere. But again I went for 5300k. Now there is only one lamp that I haven't yet done which is in my WIR.
The effect is I now find the white "day light" to be the normal light. It took about a month to get used to it but now I find the yellow warm light to look dirty. The one light left in the WIR has the mental effect on me of being unclean. Don't know why I have that association but thats the way I find myself describing it.
I should point out though that the decor we have does have the effect of softening the light as well. Our house is pretty much tiled through-out but it's tiled with a hi-gloss porcelain tile that looks like a natural sandstone (yellow tone vs grey or white). And we have a lot of timber which also throws additional colour. The only place white just didn't work was inside of display cabinets where the cabinets were timber. It made the timber look incredibly cheap and nasty where as the yellow tone worked better.
The other nice side effect was during the day if it is a little dull inside turning on the LEDs actually makes the day feel brighter rather than feeling like you turned the lights on.