A copy of the OFLC Board Report on Fallout 3 can be found at Australian Gamer.
Basically, Fallout 3 has been refused classification because the majority of the Board consider that the use of "Chems" and specifically the Morphine chem to provide advantages in combat contravene the National Classification Code.
From the text of the report it appears that renaming the Morphine chem to 'Painkillers'(or some other generic name that is not a prescription drug) and changing the icons presented in the menu for selecting chems will be sufficient to get the game classified MA15+.
I have no idea why Fallout 3 has been singled out like this when other games such as Max Payne, Bioshock, Haze and the original Fallout games all have similar drug use.
Re:The problem is that SETI is broken.
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
A real SETI project would cost many orders of magnitude more, and would require radio telescopes many orders of magnitude more sensitive than we have now. We're talking something on the level of making a crater miles across and making it into a radio dish. Arecibo is puny in comparison to what we need.
Blanketing an area the size of Rhode Island with a dish array might also work (though it would have to be very, very precisely controlled).
Any serious SETI effort that hopes to find someone that doesn't know we're here already and wants to talk to us will cost many many billions of dollars.
They seem to think that they will be able to build an array capable of detecting Earth-like radio leakage, not deliberate beacon signals, at a distance of several hundred to a few thousand light years at a price tag less than US$2bn.
The plan is for the array to span a continent (either Africa or Australia) and have the majority of its receiver elements located in areas of low radio background. This will enable the array to be very resistant to local noise sources as they will have significantly different directions of arrival at distant receivers, allowing local sources to be identified and cancelled out during signal processing. Conversely, distant sources will have similar directions of arrival despite the separation between the receivers.
By processing across numerous receivers you can also compensate for the effects of thermal noise, allowing the array as a whole to have a higher sensitivity and a lower effective noise floor than the individual receivers.
The main downside to the SKA is the ongoing bickering and indecision that seems to plague all international level scientific projects with regards to funding, location and use of the final product.
1. How does one find/fix breakages in 20,000 km of cable? How would this be not much worse than repairing the trans-Atlantic cables, from a cost-benefit view?
As these are Fibre Optic cables it is quite simple to locate breakages using a device known as an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR). You send an optical pulse down the cable and measure to see if you get reflections. If there is a break in the cable the laser will reflect off the discontinuity. The time taken for the reflection to return will give you the distance between the test point and the break as the speed of light in the cable is a known quantity.
If you then want to fix the cable you need to get to it and splice the broken fibre(s) back together. AFAIK this is done by hooking the fibre optic cable from a boat and hauling it to the surface (there is quite a bit of slack in the cables and they are well armoured) you then locate the fault and repair the break.
This isn't a replacement for the Trans-Atlantic cables, this is a redundant route so that people in South-East Asia and Australasia have an alternate route for getting traffic to the US when the cables that pass through Japan and/or Taiwan are damaged.
The vortex is probably just a result of the Leeuwin Current (linked article contains satellite thermal pictures showing eddies in the current).
The Leeuwin Current is a permanent feature of Western Australia's waters and reaches it's peak in the autumn and winter (so it is at its peak now).
From the linked article "The Leeuwin Current rarely flows around the eastern side of Rottnest, but it frequently bathes the western and southwestern sides, influencing the flora and fauna there. Sea temperatures in those regions in winter are several degrees higher than against the mainland coast."
This doesn't change anything wrt the debate about if it's right - which is primarily over the fact that the most useful stem cells still come from aborted fetuses, which nearly all anti-abortion advocates think is immoral.
It is my understanding that research stem cells do not come from aborted fetuses but instead from fetuses or fertilised eggs created for IVF (In-Vitro Fertilisation) but not implanted. This is an important distinction as surplus IVF fetuses are eventually destroyed (incinerated as biological waste) after the mother successfully gives birth.
Stem cell research is performed using fetuses that would have been destroyed anyway. Can anybody argue that using them for research is morally any worse than simply destroying them?
Slashdot Mirror
A copy of the OFLC Board Report on Fallout 3 can be found at Australian Gamer.
Basically, Fallout 3 has been refused classification because the majority of the Board consider that the use of "Chems" and specifically the Morphine chem to provide advantages in combat contravene the National Classification Code.
From the text of the report it appears that renaming the Morphine chem to 'Painkillers'(or some other generic name that is not a prescription drug) and changing the icons presented in the menu for selecting chems will be sufficient to get the game classified MA15+.
I have no idea why Fallout 3 has been singled out like this when other games such as Max Payne, Bioshock, Haze and the original Fallout games all have similar drug use.
I think you better tell that to the international consortium working on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope that has previously been discussed on Slashdot.
They seem to think that they will be able to build an array capable of detecting Earth-like radio leakage, not deliberate beacon signals, at a distance of several hundred to a few thousand light years at a price tag less than US$2bn.
The plan is for the array to span a continent (either Africa or Australia) and have the majority of its receiver elements located in areas of low radio background. This will enable the array to be very resistant to local noise sources as they will have significantly different directions of arrival at distant receivers, allowing local sources to be identified and cancelled out during signal processing. Conversely, distant sources will have similar directions of arrival despite the separation between the receivers.
By processing across numerous receivers you can also compensate for the effects of thermal noise, allowing the array as a whole to have a higher sensitivity and a lower effective noise floor than the individual receivers.
The main downside to the SKA is the ongoing bickering and indecision that seems to plague all international level scientific projects with regards to funding, location and use of the final product.
As these are Fibre Optic cables it is quite simple to locate breakages using a device known as an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR). You send an optical pulse down the cable and measure to see if you get reflections. If there is a break in the cable the laser will reflect off the discontinuity. The time taken for the reflection to return will give you the distance between the test point and the break as the speed of light in the cable is a known quantity.
If you then want to fix the cable you need to get to it and splice the broken fibre(s) back together. AFAIK this is done by hooking the fibre optic cable from a boat and hauling it to the surface (there is quite a bit of slack in the cables and they are well armoured) you then locate the fault and repair the break.
This isn't a replacement for the Trans-Atlantic cables, this is a redundant route so that people in South-East Asia and Australasia have an alternate route for getting traffic to the US when the cables that pass through Japan and/or Taiwan are damaged.
The Leeuwin Current is a permanent feature of Western Australia's waters and reaches it's peak in the autumn and winter (so it is at its peak now).
From the linked article "The Leeuwin Current rarely flows around the eastern side of Rottnest, but it frequently bathes the western and southwestern sides, influencing the flora and fauna there. Sea temperatures in those regions in winter are several degrees higher than against the mainland coast."
Stem cell research is performed using fetuses that would have been destroyed anyway. Can anybody argue that using them for research is morally any worse than simply destroying them?