I'm well aware of the situation as I've been following it for over half a decade since the former Attorney-General Michael Atkinson first put the kybosh on R18+.
Unfortunately in SA the Labor party that is the government is controlled by a "Catholic right" faction. The former AG held a lot of sway in that faction until he finally went so off the rails they tapped him on the shoulder and replaced him with the current guy, so you can probably deduce why the government never directed the former AG in how to handle the issue.
I do agree with what John Rau is proposing though as I've always wondered why we have M and MA ratings as they seem so similar.
It's about time the Labor party pulled its finger out.
Unfortunately, this announcement is nothing more than an attempt to distract the vapid media from the SA Labor party's woes of last week:
* The worst opinion poll in the party's history. * A Labor MP was arrested for child pornography offences. * A minister resigned without explanation less than three months into the job.
Top-shelf games push systems to the limits. If you have split screen you have to render and perhaps simulate multiple scenes per video frame. Memory and processing power are scarce resources. If you scale back your graphics then critics and players pan you for having "shit grafix" compared to the other top-shelf title with no split-screen multiplayer and your sales suffer.
If you'd have said six months ago that Tony Abbott had a good chance of being Prime Minister, you'd have been mercilessly mocked. Back then, Kevin Rudd was the Most. Popular. Prime Minister. Ever. for some reason and the Liberal party was in a complete mess.
Now, Kevin Rudd is nursing some knife wounds in his back delivered by his deputy not even two months ago and Tony "Mr Personality" Abbott is in the running for the top job. How did it all go so wrong? Well, that's a long story...
You wish for a system where the carrot (i.e. pork) is replaced with the stick (i.e. 'discipline'). So if someone on principle votes against his party, what happens? Is he thrown out of the party? Replaced with someone else? Then it's a dictatorship since the voted-in individual is being replaced by a party-chosen puppet. It depends upon what party you are a member of.
Of the two major parties in Australia, the Labor party does not allow dissent and MP's who vote against the party line (cross the floor) are kicked out of the party. The Liberal party, on the other hand allows dissent and doesn't kick you out of the party for crossing the floor. It's rather rare for it to happen and if you do it can certainly harm your future in the party.
Labor and its supporters are always quick to make political hay out of any dissent within the Liberal party, but at least from my point of view I think it's better that you can speak out against party policy than have to swallow your integrity and toe the party line.
The funny thing though is that quite a few people in Australia wish our politicians were a bit more like they are in the USA and not so beholden to the party line. The grass is always greener on the other side.:)
Here in Australia, we have centuries worth of the stuff in reserve with more being found each year. There's currently a mad scramble on to develop fields and LNG export facilities. In addition to that there's the recent development of coal seam methane technology.
Although I can't be bothered to read the PDF, I take it the good doctor hasn't heard of a little thing called ODX?
It's short for Olympic Dam eXpansion, a project by the world's largest mining company, BHP Billiton, to create the largest mine the world has ever seen. We're talking about an open cut mine that will eventually be over one kilometre deep and multiple kilometres in diameter where they'll be shifting more than one tonne of ore out of it every second, 24/7 for 100 years or more. They keep upgrading the reserve estimates because they haven't found the true extent of the ore deposit, which alone accounts for something like 30% of known reserves. Currently the mine produces around 5,000 tonnes each year, which isn't the largest (Ranger in the Northern Territory is) but if the expansion goes ahead on the scale they're planning then it will be spitting out much, much more.
Then there's some other large deposits in Western Australia that are only now being developed as a change of government has seen the ban on Uranium mining lifted. It's even worse in the eastern states of Australia, as they have prohibited even exploring for uranium. Hooray for the luddite Labor party! The party that is okay in South Australia and federally to be mining and exporting it, but not using it here and won't even entertain discussion of the pros and cons of Australia adopting nuclear energy.
So if there's a shortage then the price will rise (which it did in the last few years because of fears of running out of the cheap bombs) and that will spur miners to start mining already known deposits that couldn't be mined profitably at lower prices. It will also spur further exploration and eventually the price will rise high enough that it becomes more economical to reprocess spent fuel, which is apparently 90-95% still good.
There's enough Uranium out there that we'll never run out for centuries, and then there's Thorium if fusion continues to forever be 40 years away.
I'd say the more plausible explanation for this one is that extensive rains earlier in the year over the Lake Eyre basin resulted in fine silt being deposited over the thousands of square kilometres of floodplains as the water made its way over months towards the lake. The floods have gone and the silt has dried up then been picked up by an unusually big gust of wind that has carried it further than it normally would.
Anyone who's spent some time out bush would have encountered at least one dust storm before.
I think us humans generally have an inability to perceive natural cycles in the climate. The current drought is the worst since the decade-long one in the 1890's. We only have weather data going back a couple of hundred years in Australia, so I think it's pretty arrogant to think that we understand the climate here fully.
Between settlement in 1836 and 1865 when Goyder's Line was surveyed, cropping in South Australia reached hundreds of kilometres into the north - far beyond the line - because the belief at the time was "the rain follows the plough", but really it was just an exceptionally wet period of time. Then Goyder's Line was drawn and has held true ever since.
Plus I'd argue the real reason behind the water rationing in capital cities has been a failure of successive governments all over Australia for a generation to plan in advance for population growth by building infrastructure before it's needed.
There's buttloads of natural gas out there. Here in Australia we apparently have known reserves large enough to keep us running for a few centuries, and our reserves pale in comparison to say Russia.
You can run internal combustion engines on natural gas. Lots of buses run on it here in Oz, and I'm sure the only thing stopping cars being able to run on it is the government not being able to gouge us for fuel excise when everyone can fill up from the gas main at home. There's also diesel/gas engines that are used to run gensets in remote areas as natural gas is cheaper than diesel and the diesel is only used to get the engine running.
And if you're not going to run vehicles directly on natural gas I believe you can also use it as a feedstock for creating "syncrude" via the Fischer-Tropsch process, which can be refined into ultra-clean high-grade diesel and jet fuels.
Companies researching, building and operating combined cycle turbine generators running on syngas from coal gasification beg to differ. It might not be as clean as windmills or natural gas, but it's still cleaner than existing coal burning plus when you're not generating electricity you can create diesel, etc. from the gas. Coal is going to be around for decades to come simply because of the scale of existing capacity and the abundance of it. Coming up with tech to retrofit to existing coal using stuff that improves the efficiency of extracting energy from it is a smart thing to do, but it's not to say we can't do other things at the same time.
Nevermind the premier of SA Mike Rann, who took the Commonwealth to court over the decision to site the repository in SA and won... it was all the fault of John Howard!
No for powerpoint. From what I've used, OO.org's Impress is simply not as good, has rendering issues, flickers, is a resource hog, is not smooth, etc. Powerpoint is way better.
Impress is to Powerpoint as Powerpoint is to Keynote.
This sounds like someone is whining that they have a right to make money no matter what. I don't understand how it could cost upwards of $100/hr to develop something unless that's counting for the labour of more than two or three people.
I work for one of the largest independent game developers in the world. We haven't done anything on the iPhone yet, but a few guys around the company have in their own time. One sells his for 99c, another bloke sells his for 1.99 and another two sell their game for 4.99. I would say the production standards are ranked according to the price, but you know what? The crappy-looking 99c one that was slapped together in a week has sold thousands of copies and the others haven't. Is it the price or is it the fact that it's the most fun? Probably both, but he also offers a free demo as well, which I'd say is why it's so successful compared to the others.
iPhone apps are like ideas... there's an abundance of great ones out there, but only the ones with the good marketing to stand out from the crowd will make it. The iPhone is probably also like other mobiles, in that there isn't much money to be made at all by developing apps. If I ever get off my butt and find the motivation to make something for it, I'd be wrapped if it made enough to buy me a new MacBook Pro and LED Cinema Display. Anything else would be awesome, but that's because I already have a day job that I live off.
Sounds like the Australian government back at the dawn of programmable digital computers. The CSIRO built one of the first in the world (I think they named it CSIRAC) but the government at the time basically said "Australia's future is in sheep". Australian governments have always had a tendency to shoot us in the foot when it comes to science and technology development.
I might expect this from Liberals - but from Labor?
The Liberal Party is for individual freedom, personal responsibility and that government should give people a hand-up, not a hand out. The Labor Party is for cutting everyone down to the same level of mediocrity, government knows best and American spelling.
Sure, they don't always stick to those lines and sway from them in different areas of policy like social versus economic, but that depends upon the political climate of the era and which party factions hold sway (after all, Labor governments instated the white Australia and mandatory detention policies). Mostly you can see those lines of thinking coming through in their policies.
That's what I think is fair about metered data, it allows for us to have really fast connections so that we can pull down stuff quickly when we need it. If we had unmetered connections then for ISP's to remain solvent and maintain the pricing, the connections would have to be a lot slower.
I don't know about everyone else, but I like the fact that I can pull down a gigabyte of data in under 15 minutes when I need to. I'm yet to exceed my quota of 25GB/month, and soon with the completion of the new PPC-1 cable to Guam, the bandwidth situation in Australia is going to become a whole lot better. Industry pundits are saying the cost of international transit (70% of Australian traffic according to the article) will be cut in half within 12 months of the cable coming on-line.
Considering the cost of that transit is a small portion of the monthly ISP fee, I expect that prices won't go down much, but quotas will go up a lot.
De Georgio: "Ah that's one thing about our Harry, doesn't play any favorites! Harry hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Niggers, Honkies, Chinks, you name it."
I'm pretty sure Sega paid for it, considering the other day I read an article in an Australian tabloid that was almost identical except for the organisation "speaking out" being the Australian Family Association.
Do they pay dividends? Perhaps it's a stupid question, but as an Aussie beginning to dabble in shares it seems like a lot of these "hot" US tech companies don't pay dividends.
I mean, Microsoft only recently started paying them despite raking in enormous profits every year. Does Google pay dividends? I believe that their shares don't even allow you to vote... madness!
Do people pay enormous amounts for shares in these companies hoping that one day they will pay dividends or do they hope that some other company will buy them out? They're really the only reasons I can think of.
Bearing in mind all the other promises Intel has made about their previous graphics offerings, I'm rather inclined to think that once again this will underwhelm. Especially considering all the crap that's been coming out of Intel about real-time raytracing. (It's always been just around the corner because rasterisation always gets faster.)
That's not to say that it's an interesting bit of tech, but from what I've seen so far it looks like the x86 version of Cell. Of course though it's a PC part and won't be showing up in any consoles anytime soon, so as a console developer it doesn't really do anything for me. I'm mostly interested in how they'll handle memory bandwidth.
I also expect that nVidia will put out something within 12 months that will stomp its guts out.
I remember that around the turn of the century Jobs espoused this concept "digital lifestlye" and that Mac would be the "hub" of this.
Digital still cameras, digital video cameras and digital music - stored on your computer and accessible and usable from other things: iPod, Internet (dotMac) and Apple TV and iPhone. So if you bear in mind the "digital lifestyle" concept, most of the announcements of recent years seem to make sense.
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I'm well aware of the situation as I've been following it for over half a decade since the former Attorney-General Michael Atkinson first put the kybosh on R18+.
Unfortunately in SA the Labor party that is the government is controlled by a "Catholic right" faction. The former AG held a lot of sway in that faction until he finally went so off the rails they tapped him on the shoulder and replaced him with the current guy, so you can probably deduce why the government never directed the former AG in how to handle the issue.
I do agree with what John Rau is proposing though as I've always wondered why we have M and MA ratings as they seem so similar.
It's about time the Labor party pulled its finger out.
Unfortunately, this announcement is nothing more than an attempt to distract the vapid media from the SA Labor party's woes of last week:
* The worst opinion poll in the party's history.
* A Labor MP was arrested for child pornography offences.
* A minister resigned without explanation less than three months into the job.
Top-shelf games push systems to the limits. If you have split screen you have to render and perhaps simulate multiple scenes per video frame. Memory and processing power are scarce resources. If you scale back your graphics then critics and players pan you for having "shit grafix" compared to the other top-shelf title with no split-screen multiplayer and your sales suffer.
If you'd have said six months ago that Tony Abbott had a good chance of being Prime Minister, you'd have been mercilessly mocked. Back then, Kevin Rudd was the Most. Popular. Prime Minister. Ever. for some reason and the Liberal party was in a complete mess.
Now, Kevin Rudd is nursing some knife wounds in his back delivered by his deputy not even two months ago and Tony "Mr Personality" Abbott is in the running for the top job. How did it all go so wrong? Well, that's a long story...
You wish for a system where the carrot (i.e. pork) is replaced with the stick (i.e. 'discipline'). So if someone on principle votes against his party, what happens? Is he thrown out of the party? Replaced with someone else? Then it's a dictatorship since the voted-in individual is being replaced by a party-chosen puppet.
It depends upon what party you are a member of.
Of the two major parties in Australia, the Labor party does not allow dissent and MP's who vote against the party line (cross the floor) are kicked out of the party. The Liberal party, on the other hand allows dissent and doesn't kick you out of the party for crossing the floor. It's rather rare for it to happen and if you do it can certainly harm your future in the party.
Labor and its supporters are always quick to make political hay out of any dissent within the Liberal party, but at least from my point of view I think it's better that you can speak out against party policy than have to swallow your integrity and toe the party line.
The funny thing though is that quite a few people in Australia wish our politicians were a bit more like they are in the USA and not so beholden to the party line. The grass is always greener on the other side. :)
Here in Australia, we have centuries worth of the stuff in reserve with more being found each year. There's currently a mad scramble on to develop fields and LNG export facilities. In addition to that there's the recent development of coal seam methane technology.
Optus turned to shit when earlier this year they unilaterally decided to start charging $2.20 to mail their bills under the guise of "being green".
Not even the banks I have accounts with are crooked enough to charge for mailing statements.
Although I can't be bothered to read the PDF, I take it the good doctor hasn't heard of a little thing called ODX?
It's short for Olympic Dam eXpansion, a project by the world's largest mining company, BHP Billiton, to create the largest mine the world has ever seen. We're talking about an open cut mine that will eventually be over one kilometre deep and multiple kilometres in diameter where they'll be shifting more than one tonne of ore out of it every second, 24/7 for 100 years or more. They keep upgrading the reserve estimates because they haven't found the true extent of the ore deposit, which alone accounts for something like 30% of known reserves. Currently the mine produces around 5,000 tonnes each year, which isn't the largest (Ranger in the Northern Territory is) but if the expansion goes ahead on the scale they're planning then it will be spitting out much, much more.
Then there's some other large deposits in Western Australia that are only now being developed as a change of government has seen the ban on Uranium mining lifted. It's even worse in the eastern states of Australia, as they have prohibited even exploring for uranium. Hooray for the luddite Labor party! The party that is okay in South Australia and federally to be mining and exporting it, but not using it here and won't even entertain discussion of the pros and cons of Australia adopting nuclear energy.
So if there's a shortage then the price will rise (which it did in the last few years because of fears of running out of the cheap bombs) and that will spur miners to start mining already known deposits that couldn't be mined profitably at lower prices. It will also spur further exploration and eventually the price will rise high enough that it becomes more economical to reprocess spent fuel, which is apparently 90-95% still good.
There's enough Uranium out there that we'll never run out for centuries, and then there's Thorium if fusion continues to forever be 40 years away.
THIS is a road train. =]
I'd say the more plausible explanation for this one is that extensive rains earlier in the year over the Lake Eyre basin resulted in fine silt being deposited over the thousands of square kilometres of floodplains as the water made its way over months towards the lake. The floods have gone and the silt has dried up then been picked up by an unusually big gust of wind that has carried it further than it normally would.
Anyone who's spent some time out bush would have encountered at least one dust storm before.
I think us humans generally have an inability to perceive natural cycles in the climate. The current drought is the worst since the decade-long one in the 1890's. We only have weather data going back a couple of hundred years in Australia, so I think it's pretty arrogant to think that we understand the climate here fully.
Between settlement in 1836 and 1865 when Goyder's Line was surveyed, cropping in South Australia reached hundreds of kilometres into the north - far beyond the line - because the belief at the time was "the rain follows the plough", but really it was just an exceptionally wet period of time. Then Goyder's Line was drawn and has held true ever since.
Plus I'd argue the real reason behind the water rationing in capital cities has been a failure of successive governments all over Australia for a generation to plan in advance for population growth by building infrastructure before it's needed.
There's buttloads of natural gas out there. Here in Australia we apparently have known reserves large enough to keep us running for a few centuries, and our reserves pale in comparison to say Russia.
You can run internal combustion engines on natural gas. Lots of buses run on it here in Oz, and I'm sure the only thing stopping cars being able to run on it is the government not being able to gouge us for fuel excise when everyone can fill up from the gas main at home. There's also diesel/gas engines that are used to run gensets in remote areas as natural gas is cheaper than diesel and the diesel is only used to get the engine running.
And if you're not going to run vehicles directly on natural gas I believe you can also use it as a feedstock for creating "syncrude" via the Fischer-Tropsch process, which can be refined into ultra-clean high-grade diesel and jet fuels.
Companies researching, building and operating combined cycle turbine generators running on syngas from coal gasification beg to differ. It might not be as clean as windmills or natural gas, but it's still cleaner than existing coal burning plus when you're not generating electricity you can create diesel, etc. from the gas. Coal is going to be around for decades to come simply because of the scale of existing capacity and the abundance of it. Coming up with tech to retrofit to existing coal using stuff that improves the efficiency of extracting energy from it is a smart thing to do, but it's not to say we can't do other things at the same time.
Nevermind the premier of SA Mike Rann, who took the Commonwealth to court over the decision to site the repository in SA and won... it was all the fault of John Howard!
No for powerpoint. From what I've used, OO.org's Impress is simply not as good, has rendering issues, flickers, is a resource hog, is not smooth, etc. Powerpoint is way better.
Impress is to Powerpoint as Powerpoint is to Keynote.
Don't cry me a river, harden the fuck up instead.
This sounds like someone is whining that they have a right to make money no matter what. I don't understand how it could cost upwards of $100/hr to develop something unless that's counting for the labour of more than two or three people.
I work for one of the largest independent game developers in the world. We haven't done anything on the iPhone yet, but a few guys around the company have in their own time. One sells his for 99c, another bloke sells his for 1.99 and another two sell their game for 4.99. I would say the production standards are ranked according to the price, but you know what? The crappy-looking 99c one that was slapped together in a week has sold thousands of copies and the others haven't. Is it the price or is it the fact that it's the most fun? Probably both, but he also offers a free demo as well, which I'd say is why it's so successful compared to the others.
iPhone apps are like ideas... there's an abundance of great ones out there, but only the ones with the good marketing to stand out from the crowd will make it. The iPhone is probably also like other mobiles, in that there isn't much money to be made at all by developing apps. If I ever get off my butt and find the motivation to make something for it, I'd be wrapped if it made enough to buy me a new MacBook Pro and LED Cinema Display. Anything else would be awesome, but that's because I already have a day job that I live off.
Sounds like the Australian government back at the dawn of programmable digital computers. The CSIRO built one of the first in the world (I think they named it CSIRAC) but the government at the time basically said "Australia's future is in sheep". Australian governments have always had a tendency to shoot us in the foot when it comes to science and technology development.
I might expect this from Liberals - but from Labor?
The Liberal Party is for individual freedom, personal responsibility and that government should give people a hand-up, not a hand out. The Labor Party is for cutting everyone down to the same level of mediocrity, government knows best and American spelling.
Sure, they don't always stick to those lines and sway from them in different areas of policy like social versus economic, but that depends upon the political climate of the era and which party factions hold sway (after all, Labor governments instated the white Australia and mandatory detention policies). Mostly you can see those lines of thinking coming through in their policies.
That's what I think is fair about metered data, it allows for us to have really fast connections so that we can pull down stuff quickly when we need it. If we had unmetered connections then for ISP's to remain solvent and maintain the pricing, the connections would have to be a lot slower.
I don't know about everyone else, but I like the fact that I can pull down a gigabyte of data in under 15 minutes when I need to. I'm yet to exceed my quota of 25GB/month, and soon with the completion of the new PPC-1 cable to Guam, the bandwidth situation in Australia is going to become a whole lot better. Industry pundits are saying the cost of international transit (70% of Australian traffic according to the article) will be cut in half within 12 months of the cable coming on-line.
Considering the cost of that transit is a small portion of the monthly ISP fee, I expect that prices won't go down much, but quotas will go up a lot.
De Georgio: "Ah that's one thing about our Harry, doesn't play any favorites! Harry hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Niggers, Honkies, Chinks, you name it."
Gonzales: "How does he feel about Mexicans?"
De Georgio: "Ask him."
Harry: "Especially Spics."
I'm pretty sure Sega paid for it, considering the other day I read an article in an Australian tabloid that was almost identical except for the organisation "speaking out" being the Australian Family Association.
Do they pay dividends? Perhaps it's a stupid question, but as an Aussie beginning to dabble in shares it seems like a lot of these "hot" US tech companies don't pay dividends.
I mean, Microsoft only recently started paying them despite raking in enormous profits every year. Does Google pay dividends? I believe that their shares don't even allow you to vote... madness!
Do people pay enormous amounts for shares in these companies hoping that one day they will pay dividends or do they hope that some other company will buy them out? They're really the only reasons I can think of.
Bearing in mind all the other promises Intel has made about their previous graphics offerings, I'm rather inclined to think that once again this will underwhelm. Especially considering all the crap that's been coming out of Intel about real-time raytracing. (It's always been just around the corner because rasterisation always gets faster.)
That's not to say that it's an interesting bit of tech, but from what I've seen so far it looks like the x86 version of Cell. Of course though it's a PC part and won't be showing up in any consoles anytime soon, so as a console developer it doesn't really do anything for me. I'm mostly interested in how they'll handle memory bandwidth.
I also expect that nVidia will put out something within 12 months that will stomp its guts out.
I remember that around the turn of the century Jobs espoused this concept "digital lifestlye" and that Mac would be the "hub" of this.
Digital still cameras, digital video cameras and digital music - stored on your computer and accessible and usable from other things: iPod, Internet (dotMac) and Apple TV and iPhone. So if you bear in mind the "digital lifestyle" concept, most of the announcements of recent years seem to make sense.
John Howard was only finally voted out here after completely destroying our workplace laws costing many people their jobs
Yes, because that's exactly what happened despite him presiding over an unprecedented economic boom resulting in record-low unemployment.