Do they ever wonder why so many young Aussies live in Europe (or even the US)
Amen, I'm one of these people -- I'm in London and have no plans to return to Australia. There simply isn't enough opportunity in Australia; people who want to work on interesting stuff either have to be very lucky, or just go elsewhere.
I'm reminded of Andy Thomas, a mechanical engineer from Adelaide who wanted to serve as an astronaut. He ended up having to go to the States and naturalize to get his astronaut's wings. Having to renounce your own citizenship is a pretty big step; are policymakers in Canberra paying attention?
I've never understood the bipartisan bad attitude towards investing in science and technology in Australia.
Any funding of science and technology tends to be political in nature; take a look at some of the CRCs, which tend to either be politicians' pet projects, or freebies for somebody's support base. The CSIRO (the Australian equivalent of the Max Planck Institute or NSF, and one of the biggest of its kind on Earth), is really a huge giveaway to the primary and extractive industries.
I think it's because Australian leaders don't understand the importance of science and technology. I also think it boils down to the traditional Australian distrust of all that is too 'clever'; we'd rather stick to growing things and digging shit out of the ground rather than value-add.
The potential benefits of a military space program are obvious. When you realise that it takes six hours to cross Australian airspace by plane, you realize that that's a lot of ground to cover. Why there aren't half a dozen Australian-owned military birds already flying is a minor miracle of short-sightedness and stupidity. And it's extremely naive for Australian defence planners to always assume that the US won't screw us over when we need them the most.
And a civil space programme would do wonders for building sorely-needed industrial capability, and interest in science and technology. It doesn't even have to be expensive: do what the Canadians do, pick a niche, and get really, really good at it. For instance, advanced life support systems, or something like that... we don't HAVE to have our own launch vehicles.
Yes, in the past. Remember that Sir Keith Murdoch, and Rupert himself in his younger days, ran their businesses in the heyday of print publishing. It's the business closest to Murdoch's heart, and the one he knows best.
Murdoch is a shrewd, pragmatic (and sometimes amoral) operator who's good at making money. He's not invincible however. He dabbles in businesses and markets he doesn't understand, and he needlessly antagonises his minority shareholders. He runs businesses that lose money hand over fist.
Trying to get the average Joe to pay for newspaper content may be the caper that finally shows the world that Rupert Murdoch should've quit while he was ahead.
Unless he does something extremely radical, like partnering with Amazon to deliver newspapers wirelessly to Kindles under a subscription model, this is doomed to failure.
My favourite coding place? Well, I code for a living, and I have to say work, without a doubt. I'm far too easily distracted -- work is the worst place to get stuff done, except for all the others.
That said, badly-designed workplaces can destroy productivity. If your workplace is anything like mine, where your employer doesn't give a rat's arse about their developers' productivity, everyone will be sat at packed-in "open plan" offices, where every stray, stupid remark, every loud phone call, every meeting and every joke (and resulting braying laughter) meld together to create a totally useless work environment.
Perhaps that question should be rephrased to "what time of day do you get most work done?". Given the City's workaholic culture, most folks leave the office at 7.30pm, so my productivity peaks some time after that.
Sorry to reply to my own post, the Iraqi bought advanced _jammers_.. but you get the idea.
AIUI, the operators didn't use them properly and left them switched on when they were told by the Russian makers specifically not to. In my limited understanding, this defeated the purpose of the jammers completely.
There's a marvellous story doing the rounds, about how Iraq bought a bunch of advanced GPS receivers from Russia in case of a Coalition invasion.
There's numerous reasons given for why they didn't work, but it wasn't a problem for the Americans: the jammers were wiped out in a blink of an eye -- ironically, with satellite guided bombs.
Done right, and for short haul travel, rail is way better than air travel. What you lose in sheer speed of the plane, is more than made up for, by the time saved by not getting to the airport, checkin, luggage screening, and that sort of thing.
I've found that going to Paris on the Eurostar (French TGV bullet train that links central London and central Paris) beats air travel in just about every way. I had my parents insist on catching the plane to Paris.
This is what happens when you go from London to Paris by air:
1. Catch bus or train to airport (1hr) 2. Allow three hours to check in, get through security, board the plane, and have your plane sit in a long queue to take off (2-3 hours) 3. Fly to Paris (50 minutes) 4. Disembark at Roissy, go through immigration, get to the RER train (30, 40mins) 5. Get an RER ticket, catch train to Gare du Nord, trying not to get robbed by pikies on the way (40, 50mins)
Compare with catching the Eurostar:
1. Go to Kings Cross St Pancras, go through French immigration on British side, security screening (20 minutes). Immigration is no more than waving an ID card or passport. 2. Train trip (a bit over two hours) 3. Train arrives in middle of Paris.
Price wise, you might save a few quid catching the plane, but if you factor in airport transfers, security screening hassle and all that rubbish, then train travel comes out way ahead.
Mikeyy described how he carried out the attack:
"I am the person who coded the XSS which then acted as a worm when it auto updated a users profile and status,
Isn't that called "criminal damage"? Now if I'm not mistaken, the police and courts tend to frown on that sort of thing.
Well, maybe I should've phrased the question a little better... and I certainly wasn't trying to be cute or 'politica' as it were. I'm a big advocate of science spending in general.
What I *should've* asked, was:
"there are many equivalent and roughly as-challenging problem areas out there, and there seems to be a great deal of work being done on neuroscience and related fields, with breakthroughs announced on a daily basis. What's driving the interest, time and money being devoted into neuroscience, as opposed to, say, cancer immunology.... ?
I went through school, being told by science teachers that science really knows squat about the brain and how it works.
Obviously, researchers can't resist a mystery and an intellectual challenge, and I can see why it would be fascinating to try and unravel the mysteries about how the brain works.
I have a question for the neuroscientists however... what's so critically important about this work, to demand the enormous resources being sunk into this?
My personal issue with the Murdoch press really boils down to what his newspapers do to political discourse in the markets he publishes in.
Of course, low-brow right-wing rags *sell*, so his publications are certainly optimal from a free-market point of view.
HOWEVER, cynical rabble-rousing, soft porn, beatups, ethically-dubious cross-selling between Murdoch businesses, and craven bum-licking of tyrannical political regimes, is certainly NOT optimal from society's point of view.
IMHO, what we lose from Murdoch papers closing shop, I think, will be more than offset by the removal of a poisonous and malign influence on society.
I'm happy for Craigslist to destroy the newspaper industry (at least in the English speaking world), so long as it takes Rupert Murdoch and his empire with it.
So I suppose, that if they scale this up, they'll end up with something about as bright as a lab rat? Rats are smart, don't get me wrong, but it hardly seems likely they'll be getting the thing to write poetry.
I was going to post a rebuttal, but then, going through your posting history, it looks like ad hominem attacks and right-wing politics is basically your raison d'etre.
I've seen worse myself. But then I really do read Slashdot on a regular basis.
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
By far the nastiest and most insidious threat to democracy in Australia is the Catholic far Right. Their home has traditionally been the "right" of the ALP, although some Catholic militants, like Tony Abbott have gone joined the opposition conservative parties.
In years past, they've played mostly a spoiling role in Australia politics. As fascists, they know only how to destroy, not build, so they formed a right-wing fringe political party (the Democratic Labour Party, which in Whitlam's immortal words, was neither democratic, nor liberal, nor a party) kept the ALP out of government for 25 years and the country stagnated for decades under a conservative government. After B. A. Santamaria died and after the fall of Communism, they went back to infiltrating mainstream political parties.
These days, their strongholds are right-wing unions (the SDA , of which I was a member -- if I had known my union dues were being siphoned off by Phalangists and militant anti-abortionists, I would've quit instantly...), and the right wings of the ALP and Liberal parties.
Democracy and rational debate has always been anathema for these fascists. Their malign and destructive influence has been out there for all to see, although there has been very few political forces organised enough to challenge them head on.
If there's a vicious anti-democratic force in Australian politics, chances are, militant right-wing Catholics are behind it.
My mum's a primary school teacher, so I got to hear all about the crazy fads that sweep through the education system as regularly as forest fires.
Education fads are a bit like management fads, or the hype-waves that sweep IT; some self-important tosser somewhere in academia comes up with a stupid idea, some government pinheads buy into it, and before you know it, it's all over like a bad rash.
The movement to boost pupils' self-esteem was a recent big one, which according to a recent piece on the BBC, took off in America. The idea, is that kids get praised all the time as a means of positive reinforcement -- with the obvious drawbacks.
But then again, it could be the Dunning-Kruger Effect (where the incompetent are unable to see their own incompetence), which is as strong now as it always has been.
Military manned spaceflight has been seen for decades as a colossal waste of money. Up until now, only the Soviets were dumb enough to try (and fail spectacularly).
I'd rate human spaceflight for civilian purposes ("research", "national leadership" -- basically for the hell of it), as only something worthwhile only when the value added by having humans around far exceeds the money saved by using robots -- which isn't often.
The military is usually interested in results. That's why the US rejected manned military space decades ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they ever wonder why so many young Aussies live in Europe (or even the US)
Amen, I'm one of these people -- I'm in London and have no plans to return to Australia. There simply isn't enough opportunity in Australia; people who want to work on interesting stuff either have to be very lucky, or just go elsewhere.
I'm reminded of Andy Thomas, a mechanical engineer from Adelaide who wanted to serve as an astronaut. He ended up having to go to the States and naturalize to get his astronaut's wings. Having to renounce your own citizenship is a pretty big step; are policymakers in Canberra paying attention?
I've never understood the bipartisan bad attitude towards investing in science and technology in Australia.
Any funding of science and technology tends to be political in nature; take a look at some of the CRCs, which tend to either be politicians' pet projects, or freebies for somebody's support base. The CSIRO (the Australian equivalent of the Max Planck Institute or NSF, and one of the biggest of its kind on Earth), is really a huge giveaway to the primary and extractive industries.
I think it's because Australian leaders don't understand the importance of science and technology. I also think it boils down to the traditional Australian distrust of all that is too 'clever'; we'd rather stick to growing things and digging shit out of the ground rather than value-add.
The potential benefits of a military space program are obvious. When you realise that it takes six hours to cross Australian airspace by plane, you realize that that's a lot of ground to cover. Why there aren't half a dozen Australian-owned military birds already flying is a minor miracle of short-sightedness and stupidity. And it's extremely naive for Australian defence planners to always assume that the US won't screw us over when we need them the most.
And a civil space programme would do wonders for building sorely-needed industrial capability, and interest in science and technology. It doesn't even have to be expensive: do what the Canadians do, pick a niche, and get really, really good at it. For instance, advanced life support systems, or something like that... we don't HAVE to have our own launch vehicles.
I'm not holding my breath though.
Yes, I wish I'd thought of it.
After suffering through poor-quality Murdoch products in my short life, I'd dearly love to find a way to kick the old man in the balls.
Yes, in the past. Remember that Sir Keith Murdoch, and Rupert himself in his younger days, ran their businesses in the heyday of print publishing. It's the business closest to Murdoch's heart, and the one he knows best.
Murdoch is a shrewd, pragmatic (and sometimes amoral) operator who's good at making money. He's not invincible however. He dabbles in businesses and markets he doesn't understand, and he needlessly antagonises his minority shareholders. He runs businesses that lose money hand over fist.
Trying to get the average Joe to pay for newspaper content may be the caper that finally shows the world that Rupert Murdoch should've quit while he was ahead.
Unless he does something extremely radical, like partnering with Amazon to deliver newspapers wirelessly to Kindles under a subscription model, this is doomed to failure.
My favourite coding place? Well, I code for a living, and I have to say work, without a doubt. I'm far too easily distracted -- work is the worst place to get stuff done, except for all the others.
That said, badly-designed workplaces can destroy productivity. If your workplace is anything like mine, where your employer doesn't give a rat's arse about their developers' productivity, everyone will be sat at packed-in "open plan" offices, where every stray, stupid remark, every loud phone call, every meeting and every joke (and resulting braying laughter) meld together to create a totally useless work environment.
Perhaps that question should be rephrased to "what time of day do you get most work done?". Given the City's workaholic culture, most folks leave the office at 7.30pm, so my productivity peaks some time after that.
Yeah, I'm a sad bastard with no life :-)
Sorry to reply to my own post, the Iraqi bought advanced _jammers_.. but you get the idea.
AIUI, the operators didn't use them properly and left them switched on when they were told by the Russian makers specifically not to. In my limited understanding, this defeated the purpose of the jammers completely.
There's a marvellous story doing the rounds, about how Iraq bought a bunch of advanced GPS receivers from Russia in case of a Coalition invasion.
There's numerous reasons given for why they didn't work, but it wasn't a problem for the Americans: the jammers were wiped out in a blink of an eye -- ironically, with satellite guided bombs.
Done right, and for short haul travel, rail is way better than air travel. What you lose in sheer speed of the plane, is more than made up for, by the time saved by not getting to the airport, checkin, luggage screening, and that sort of thing.
I've found that going to Paris on the Eurostar (French TGV bullet train that links central London and central Paris) beats air travel in just about every way. I had my parents insist on catching the plane to Paris.
This is what happens when you go from London to Paris by air:
1. Catch bus or train to airport (1hr)
2. Allow three hours to check in, get through security, board the plane, and have your plane sit in a long queue to take off (2-3 hours)
3. Fly to Paris (50 minutes)
4. Disembark at Roissy, go through immigration, get to the RER train (30, 40mins)
5. Get an RER ticket, catch train to Gare du Nord, trying not to get robbed by pikies on the way (40, 50mins)
Compare with catching the Eurostar:
1. Go to Kings Cross St Pancras, go through French immigration on British side, security screening (20 minutes). Immigration is no more than waving an ID card or passport.
2. Train trip (a bit over two hours)
3. Train arrives in middle of Paris.
Price wise, you might save a few quid catching the plane, but if you factor in airport transfers, security screening hassle and all that rubbish, then train travel comes out way ahead.
Isn't that called "criminal damage"? Now if I'm not mistaken, the police and courts tend to frown on that sort of thing.
From the point of view of an outsider looking in, it looks like this Slashdot story just got bum-rushed by a bunch of brawling microbiologists.
Is there some big long-running all-in slugfest here that we ought to know about?
I seem to remember that the CIA planted a logic bomb in an shipped component; and it was nothing to do with the system getting hacked over a network.
Well, maybe I should've phrased the question a little better... and I certainly wasn't trying to be cute or 'politica' as it were. I'm a big advocate of science spending in general.
What I *should've* asked, was:
"there are many equivalent and roughly as-challenging problem areas out there, and there seems to be a great deal of work being done on neuroscience and related fields, with breakthroughs announced on a daily basis. What's driving the interest, time and money being devoted into neuroscience, as opposed to, say, cancer immunology.... ?
I went through school, being told by science teachers that science really knows squat about the brain and how it works.
Obviously, researchers can't resist a mystery and an intellectual challenge, and I can see why it would be fascinating to try and unravel the mysteries about how the brain works.
I have a question for the neuroscientists however... what's so critically important about this work, to demand the enormous resources being sunk into this?
My personal issue with the Murdoch press really boils down to what his newspapers do to political discourse in the markets he publishes in.
Of course, low-brow right-wing rags *sell*, so his publications are certainly optimal from a free-market point of view.
HOWEVER, cynical rabble-rousing, soft porn, beatups, ethically-dubious cross-selling between Murdoch businesses, and craven bum-licking of tyrannical political regimes, is certainly NOT optimal from society's point of view.
IMHO, what we lose from Murdoch papers closing shop, I think, will be more than offset by the removal of a poisonous and malign influence on society.
Ouch, sorry to hear that man :(
I'm happy for Craigslist to destroy the newspaper industry (at least in the English speaking world), so long as it takes Rupert Murdoch and his empire with it.
So I suppose, that if they scale this up, they'll end up with something about as bright as a lab rat? Rats are smart, don't get me wrong, but it hardly seems likely they'll be getting the thing to write poetry.
Question from somebody who's done some compiler work with VMs but not Parrot...
What does Parrot do that other VMs can't (e.g. the .NET dynamic language runtime on the CLR, or the JVM?)
Without knowing better, it seems like a lot of duplicated effort to me...
Glad they managed to get GOCE to orbit in one piece.
Cut-price Russian satellite launches don't seem to work out all that often. Probably a good thing for American cities in the case of a nuclear war...
I was going to post a rebuttal, but then, going through your posting history, it looks like ad hominem attacks and right-wing politics is basically your raison d'etre.
I've seen worse myself. But then I really do read Slashdot on a regular basis.
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
By far the nastiest and most insidious threat to democracy in Australia is the Catholic far Right. Their home has traditionally been the "right" of the ALP, although some Catholic militants, like Tony Abbott have gone joined the opposition conservative parties.
In years past, they've played mostly a spoiling role in Australia politics. As fascists, they know only how to destroy, not build, so they formed a right-wing fringe political party (the Democratic Labour Party, which in Whitlam's immortal words, was neither democratic, nor liberal, nor a party) kept the ALP out of government for 25 years and the country stagnated for decades under a conservative government. After B. A. Santamaria died and after the fall of Communism, they went back to infiltrating mainstream political parties.
These days, their strongholds are right-wing unions (the SDA , of which I was a member -- if I had known my union dues were being siphoned off by Phalangists and militant anti-abortionists, I would've quit instantly...), and the right wings of the ALP and Liberal parties.
Democracy and rational debate has always been anathema for these fascists. Their malign and destructive influence has been out there for all to see, although there has been very few political forces organised enough to challenge them head on.
If there's a vicious anti-democratic force in Australian politics, chances are, militant right-wing Catholics are behind it.
My mum's a primary school teacher, so I got to hear all about the crazy fads that sweep through the education system as regularly as forest fires.
Education fads are a bit like management fads, or the hype-waves that sweep IT; some self-important tosser somewhere in academia comes up with a stupid idea, some government pinheads buy into it, and before you know it, it's all over like a bad rash.
The movement to boost pupils' self-esteem was a recent big one, which according to a recent piece on the BBC, took off in America. The idea, is that kids get praised all the time as a means of positive reinforcement -- with the obvious drawbacks.
But then again, it could be the Dunning-Kruger Effect (where the incompetent are unable to see their own incompetence), which is as strong now as it always has been.
ISI created the Taliban for their own cynical political reasons. American was only a small part of the problem.
Military manned spaceflight has been seen for decades as a colossal waste of money. Up until now, only the Soviets were dumb enough to try (and fail spectacularly).
I'd rate human spaceflight for civilian purposes ("research", "national leadership" -- basically for the hell of it), as only something worthwhile only when the value added by having humans around far exceeds the money saved by using robots -- which isn't often.
The military is usually interested in results. That's why the US rejected manned military space decades ago.