Microwaves are intentional radiation and are used to TRANSMIT power
Well over a hundred years back Tesla tried broadcast power, showed that it was very ineffient, and moved on to other things. That is why we use AC over wires.
I see this whole thing as about science getting a bad reputation (often due to misinformation eg. "smoking won't kill you", or drastic and incorrect simplification by elements of the media), and being opposed at every turn by the superstitious.
I would not live under an 11kV power line, but wouln't mind living fifty metres away, because I know that the intensity of the electric field drops away rapidly with distance. Some people would object to it being within sight. A lot of people fall into the trap of sorting things into "bad" and "good", without remembering that something as simple as fire can be both, depending on where it is.
The refugees are held in privatised "for profit" detention centres.
Are you sure about this?
Yes.
All six of Australia's immigration detention centres are run by a private firm Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), a subsidiary of Wackenhut, an American multinational. In addition, ACM runs a number of jails on Australia's east coast.
I don't believe refugees are unworthy because of the amount of money that they have.
However a lot of other people do.
I'm not all that impressed with "refugees" stopping safely in 3 or more other countries before they arrive, though.
Good point. The other countries don't want them either - and the refugees don't want to live there. There's not much point going from Afganistan to Pakistan if you are just going to get sent back.
but the basic principle of imprisonment and repatriation is sound.
In this case the implementation sucks badly. The refugees are held in privatised "for profit" detention centres. Conditions are deteriorating all of the time for economic reasons.
Many refugees have been held for times in excess of two years. To a large degree that is due to appeals, but it is still a very bad situation.
The most recent turn of events is to persuade countries in the local area to take the refugees instead - this is known as the "Pacific Solution".
One journalist pointed out that if the refugees re-located to pacific islands had been given enough cash to qualify for the business migration scheme, then it would have cost only a small fraction of the pre-election stunt that occurred.
but for someone who *is* a genuine asylum seeker, 3 months in an internment camp where they are safe will seem like a holiday
True, and it appears that in almost all cases people the people in the camps will stick it out for the hope of the future - and they don't have anything good to go back to. What most people don't realise is that this is not about the worthy or the unworthy - the government and apparently the majority of the population don't want any of them. The first thing the government did here as soon as the Taliban fell was to try to send all of the Afgans back.
A lot of people would consider every refugee here unworthy, since they had to be rich or have a lot of contacts to get here in the first place.
Refugees from Europe made this country what it is now, and probably made the changes that kept Australia from going the way of Argentina (another country that had nothing but primary industry in the 1940's).
the big difference is that illegal Mexicans come here to *work* not to sponge off Uncle Sam
Here the majority don't want immigrants BECAUSE they might work and take good anglo-saxon jobs. The reality is different to the fears, but you can't hold over a hundred years of history up to people with a wall of invincible ignorance.
Remember what they first said when they were seeking power:
"Government should be run like a business", which is a textbook definition of fascism, sell the useless for buttons and soap. They don't really believe that themselves - or they wouldn't have sold most of a telecommunications business that was making enormous profits.
They are however a government that make me cringe every time I read something about them in an international news source. They demoted someone to minister of defence as a PUNISHMENT for embarrassing the government and they sent the navy to Afganistan and the army to sea. Their IT policies can at least serve as light relief on slashdot.
Any residents of the US reading this should know that the september 11 disaster was used to stir up hysteria and racism here and get this government re-elected. Australia has commited some help to the US in Afganistan, but grudgingly, and far less than we have commited to keep refugees offshore. Grand annoucements were made, but the reality was different. We are not particularly good allies to anyone at the moment.
I heard that Momento is an english language remake of the excellent "Winter Sleepers" (same director as "Run Lola Run"). Can anyone tell me is this is true?
A lot of Australian TV stations show various programs (eg. B5, Jonathon Creek Mysteries) in the wrong order - or several hours after the correct time to allow more airtime of male footballers dressing up in womens clothing.
It's a bit disconcerting to watch one episode of a program where the two main characters are sleeping together, and then watch another the next week where they are complete strangers that don't meet until the end of the episode.
OOP can be useful if you're trying to model something... but it's not that great for say, solving a system of equations
I don't know about you, but I see a mathematical model of processes or objects as a system of equations. How else do you describe them? If you are talking about sequences of events you should recall that those are also described by equations.
I'm sure that OOP is useful in modelling, but more detail would be nice. Most people don't realise that the engineering problems solved on supercomputers are usually approximations, and increasing efficiency or available resources can improve those approximations. Even a mundane problem like the temperature distribution of someone jogging in wet trousers on a humid sunny day would need serious computing power, and there are a lot of problems more complex than that which can give useful results.
Yes, that is one thing that we do have in common with the United States, although people in the USA seem to prefer to remember a bunch of intolerant heretics instead of the convicts that were shipped there. It takes all sorts to make a nation - and few people stop to think that those that are helping to build the nation of the future are still arriving.
I have only to look "down under" to see a government that is full of raving lunatics.
Ok - true, we sent the NAVY to Afganistan (land-locked folks, you should all know by now) and the ARMY out to sea to hassle refugees, and recommended that work involving computers should be outsourced to India.
When Australia decided to ban guns, you know what happened? the crime skyrocketed.
Interesting point, with two problems:
First, guns were not banned, just certain types of guns.
Second, the crime rate hasn't noticebly changed.
You may notice that none of those web sites have an "au" suffix - or are from any respected news source. Some people in the U.S. of A who have a vague idea that Australia is in the southern hemisphere and is run by baby eating communists have written many articles that make Australia look a lot worse than Beiriut a few years back. "Road Warrior" is a movie - get over it, it isn't real, it's even dubbed into American for those who cannot understand english, and with the print flipped for those who can't understand that people drive on the other side of the road in some countries.
I used to use methanol in an ultrasonic cleaner to remove crud from instrument parts.
Are you sure it wasn't ethanol? Ethanol is cheaper and does the same job - and that's what I always used. Having to sign government paperwork everytime quantities of around a litre were taken out of the store was a pain however.
I know one guy who used chloroform to clean lenses instead of ethanol (which would have been easier to use) purely because there were less restrictions of the chloroform.
A few drops on your hand will NOT make one go blind.
You may recall that it will diffuse through your skin. It may not have any obvious immediate effects each time, but that doesn't mean it's always safe to get a few drops on the skin. I used to clean things that I held by bare hands with xyline until the news came out that skin contact with that could produce toxic effects and possible cancer.
Read the materials safety data sheet before you touch any of this stuff.
Over here (Australia) the only sane way to get tech support is through a third party anyway - and linux third party support is becoming a lot more widespread.
The term "IT student" was invented for the CS dropouts. The people who just DID NOT CUT IT
When I went through uni half of the people doing CS subjects graduated with an Arts degree instead of a Science degree. I suspect the "IT" people cut it just as well as the "CS" people of a decade ago.
There are a number of projects that have been introduced for the further protection of the Euro.
People have been putting radio collars on them and tracking them for years - but that's the marsupial known as the Euro. They are also called Wallaroos - think of a kangaroo covered in grey fur with big muscles on the front legs as well as the back legs.
Then again - that is in the land where a 17 inch monitor is a half grown lizard.
If the air temperature is 40 celcius then you need as much airflow as you can get (I have the box open and a 40 cm pedestal fan pointing at the drives) I have to put up with the noise. An air conditioner would drop the overall air temperature, remove the need for a couple of case fans and move a lot of the noise outside.
The biggest problem in the first case is going to be dependancies -- CS 302 requires CS 301, CS 303 requires CS 302
I hit this problem and a wall of arrogance.
I did an engineering degree a few years ago and did the first year programming subject that existed at the time run by the CS department and some later Fortran subjects run by the Maths department and the Engineering school. A few years later I found myself working on campus with only a part time job and decided to do a degree in CS. I found that the single first year programming subject had split into eight WITHOUT COVERING ANY MORE GROUND - and no credit would be accepted under any circumstances from any programming subjects done through the maths department (politics!). I was looking at four semesters of tiny little subjects before I had the prerequisites to do a subject that could teach me something (other than patience - which I didn't have enough of) since the new subjects were geared towards people without a science/maths background, and I would have found them trivial straight from high school (where I got to play with Z80 assembly code). I gave up on the idea and went back to engineering work for a while - and hit the books later. I beleive the purpose of a degree is to teach you how to learn how to get the right skill set - and the purpose of a Phd is to prove that you are stubborn enough to work on the same difficult problem for many years.
Anyone know what OS all of those NCR automatic teller machines run on? It's certainly not an MS product, probably some breed of *nix, but I'm sure it's not linux.
My point is that most people will not notice if linux boxes appear in public places - unless they are plastered with penguin stickers.
what the fuck are you talking about when you say the US has jurisdiction in these matters worldwide? take your head out of your ass and consider how the US could possibly be justified--and how other countries would allow it--
US law has been applied from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli for an awfully long time - but before the last 50 years it was usually only enforced in the US's personal pond of the Caribean. The US has considered everything outside the USSR and China as it's juristiction for 50 years, and now you are expected to obey US law there too.
Just don't come by boat - or we'll push you out to sea!
If someone runs a plane into one of your buildings our leaders will whip up as much hysteria and racism as they can to win election (Apparently Australia was the number 3 target of Bin Laden - fortunately reality didn't match fantasy), while only providing token support. More military resources were used to chase refugees than were sent to Afganistan - and get this, we sent the NAVY to Afganistan and the SAS (part of the Army) to hassle refugees north of Australia. This government is actually suggesting to businesses that they should outsource all of their IT work to another country (India).
You'll hear a lot more about Australia and IT, and I don't think any of it will be good.
The broadband providers are going out of business, folks!
This article is about Australia and not the US - the parent companies of the two broadband providers are making record profits. Whether the broadband side of the business is making a profit or not depends upon what other parts of the same company are charging them. The two companies (Telstra and Optus) own ALL of the broadband infrastucture in the country, from the trans-oceanic cables, to the exchanges, routers and cable modems.
The true cost of cable over here is hard to work out, due to all of the internal charging within the two telecommunications companies.
I like the idea of another SF series which is not overwhelmed with niceness and fuzzyness, where the scariest of foes (eg. kingons or borg) become the cuddliest of companions after a few episodes.
Blakes 7 was most definitely anti-trek, with the totalitarian empire of the Federation having its symbol as Trek Federation symbol on its side. The great writing, some good acting and some good characters made up for a low budget. Can you imagine a dialogue like this between heroes in any current American SF series:
"I'm in front, I should have the gun"
"No, I've got the gun, that's why you're in front"
Windows will always be simple to those that never install or configure it.
Give someone a box with Netscape on it and they won't care what OS it has if they want to browse the web. Give someone a box with StarOffice or Wordperfect on it and they can write their docs.
Re:Neverwinter Nights For Linux
on
Uplink
·
· Score: 2
This is one game that would complete my conversion from Windows to Linux.
A hard disk crash on the "C:" win2k drive completed my conversion from Windows to Linux:(
Slashdot Mirror
I see this whole thing as about science getting a bad reputation (often due to misinformation eg. "smoking won't kill you", or drastic and incorrect simplification by elements of the media), and being opposed at every turn by the superstitious.
I would not live under an 11kV power line, but wouln't mind living fifty metres away, because I know that the intensity of the electric field drops away rapidly with distance. Some people would object to it being within sight. A lot of people fall into the trap of sorting things into "bad" and "good", without remembering that something as simple as fire can be both, depending on where it is.
In this case the implementation sucks badly. The refugees are held in privatised "for profit" detention centres. Conditions are deteriorating all of the time for economic reasons.
Many refugees have been held for times in excess of two years. To a large degree that is due to appeals, but it is still a very bad situation.
The most recent turn of events is to persuade countries in the local area to take the refugees instead - this is known as the "Pacific Solution".
One journalist pointed out that if the refugees re-located to pacific islands had been given enough cash to qualify for the business migration scheme, then it would have cost only a small fraction of the pre-election stunt that occurred.
True, and it appears that in almost all cases people the people in the camps will stick it out for the hope of the future - and they don't have anything good to go back to. What most people don't realise is that this is not about the worthy or the unworthy - the government and apparently the majority of the population don't want any of them. The first thing the government did here as soon as the Taliban fell was to try to send all of the Afgans back.
A lot of people would consider every refugee here unworthy, since they had to be rich or have a lot of contacts to get here in the first place.
Refugees from Europe made this country what it is now, and probably made the changes that kept Australia from going the way of Argentina (another country that had nothing but primary industry in the 1940's).
Here the majority don't want immigrants BECAUSE they might work and take good anglo-saxon jobs. The reality is different to the fears, but you can't hold over a hundred years of history up to people with a wall of invincible ignorance.
Remember what they first said when they were seeking power:
"Government should be run like a business", which is a textbook definition of fascism, sell the useless for buttons and soap. They don't really believe that themselves - or they wouldn't have sold most of a telecommunications business that was making enormous profits.
They are however a government that make me cringe every time I read something about them in an international news source. They demoted someone to minister of defence as a PUNISHMENT for embarrassing the government and they sent the navy to Afganistan and the army to sea. Their IT policies can at least serve as light relief on slashdot.
Any residents of the US reading this should know that the september 11 disaster was used to stir up hysteria and racism here and get this government re-elected. Australia has commited some help to the US in Afganistan, but grudgingly, and far less than we have commited to keep refugees offshore. Grand annoucements were made, but the reality was different. We are not particularly good allies to anyone at the moment.
I think this has the makings of a good poll question:
Should Aunt Tillie compile her kernel?
< * > Yes
<   > No
<   > Cowboy Neal should do it for her
According to RMS from a few years back it should probably be LiGNU@X - obviously pronounced "licks nuts."
I heard that Momento is an english language remake of the excellent "Winter Sleepers" (same director as "Run Lola Run"). Can anyone tell me is this is true?
It's a bit disconcerting to watch one episode of a program where the two main characters are sleeping together, and then watch another the next week where they are complete strangers that don't meet until the end of the episode.
I'm sure that OOP is useful in modelling, but more detail would be nice. Most people don't realise that the engineering problems solved on supercomputers are usually approximations, and increasing efficiency or available resources can improve those approximations. Even a mundane problem like the temperature distribution of someone jogging in wet trousers on a humid sunny day would need serious computing power, and there are a lot of problems more complex than that which can give useful results.
First, guns were not banned, just certain types of guns.
Second, the crime rate hasn't noticebly changed.
You may notice that none of those web sites have an "au" suffix - or are from any respected news source. Some people in the U.S. of A who have a vague idea that Australia is in the southern hemisphere and is run by baby eating communists have written many articles that make Australia look a lot worse than Beiriut a few years back. "Road Warrior" is a movie - get over it, it isn't real, it's even dubbed into American for those who cannot understand english, and with the print flipped for those who can't understand that people drive on the other side of the road in some countries.
It's more coppery - doesn't look like iron at all.
I know one guy who used chloroform to clean lenses instead of ethanol (which would have been easier to use) purely because there were less restrictions of the chloroform.
You may recall that it will diffuse through your skin. It may not have any obvious immediate effects each time, but that doesn't mean it's always safe to get a few drops on the skin. I used to clean things that I held by bare hands with xyline until the news came out that skin contact with that could produce toxic effects and possible cancer.Read the materials safety data sheet before you touch any of this stuff.
Over here (Australia) the only sane way to get tech support is through a third party anyway - and linux third party support is becoming a lot more widespread.
Then again - that is in the land where a 17 inch monitor is a half grown lizard.
If the air temperature is 40 celcius then you need as much airflow as you can get (I have the box open and a 40 cm pedestal fan pointing at the drives) I have to put up with the noise. An air conditioner would drop the overall air temperature, remove the need for a couple of case fans and move a lot of the noise outside.
I did an engineering degree a few years ago and did the first year programming subject that existed at the time run by the CS department and some later Fortran subjects run by the Maths department and the Engineering school. A few years later I found myself working on campus with only a part time job and decided to do a degree in CS. I found that the single first year programming subject had split into eight WITHOUT COVERING ANY MORE GROUND - and no credit would be accepted under any circumstances from any programming subjects done through the maths department (politics!). I was looking at four semesters of tiny little subjects before I had the prerequisites to do a subject that could teach me something (other than patience - which I didn't have enough of) since the new subjects were geared towards people without a science/maths background, and I would have found them trivial straight from high school (where I got to play with Z80 assembly code). I gave up on the idea and went back to engineering work for a while - and hit the books later. I beleive the purpose of a degree is to teach you how to learn how to get the right skill set - and the purpose of a Phd is to prove that you are stubborn enough to work on the same difficult problem for many years.
My point is that most people will not notice if linux boxes appear in public places - unless they are plastered with penguin stickers.
If someone runs a plane into one of your buildings our leaders will whip up as much hysteria and racism as they can to win election (Apparently Australia was the number 3 target of Bin Laden - fortunately reality didn't match fantasy), while only providing token support. More military resources were used to chase refugees than were sent to Afganistan - and get this, we sent the NAVY to Afganistan and the SAS (part of the Army) to hassle refugees north of Australia. This government is actually suggesting to businesses that they should outsource all of their IT work to another country (India).
You'll hear a lot more about Australia and IT, and I don't think any of it will be good.
The true cost of cable over here is hard to work out, due to all of the internal charging within the two telecommunications companies.
Blakes 7 was most definitely anti-trek, with the totalitarian empire of the Federation having its symbol as Trek Federation symbol on its side. The great writing, some good acting and some good characters made up for a low budget. Can you imagine a dialogue like this between heroes in any current American SF series:
"I'm in front, I should have the gun"
"No, I've got the gun, that's why you're in front"
Give someone a box with Netscape on it and they won't care what OS it has if they want to browse the web. Give someone a box with StarOffice or Wordperfect on it and they can write their docs.