I'm from New Zealand, much like Australia except our police aren't usually armed. Gun-culture is completely different outside the US. Over here, the bad guys don't even carry guns. Because the good guys don't carry guns, a knife or blunt instrument is sufficient if you want to threaten people, and nobody needs to get scared and jumpy with a firearm in their hand. Win-win. In New Zealand, relaxing gun controls is clearly the wrong thing to do. In the US, the gun situation is so bad already that arming everyone may be the only solution.
I'll counter your opinion with one of my own. I live in New Zealand, where (as I understand it) a licence is required to own firearms. People do; mostly farmers and hunters with rifles. It's not very difficult. I've never seen a handgun, and I've only seen half a dozen rifles plus assorted air guns, bb guns, paintball guns and a couple of crossbows. Our police are generally unarmed, except for the Armed Offenders Squad who get called out for the rare armed nutcase such as in todays events. In New Zealand we don't have any cultural association with guns except as tools for hunting - specifically no second amendment style glorification of being armed.
You're probably correct that an armed populace would have ended the killings today much sooner, but as tragic as these rare events are, I'm much happier living in a low-gun society. My understanding of violent crime in New Zealand (never first hand, thankfully) is that it's based around knives and blunt instruments. Sure, being robbed isn't great, but I'd rather be robbed at knifepoint than gunpoint. I imagine the gangs like it too, since nobody wants to actually die in a brawl. Stab wounds are very survivable and running away is a practical option if things look really bad. I also feel safer knowing that my mugger doesn't think I'm going to pull a gun on him. I'm a total pussy, and hypothetically if I was robbing people in America I'd sneak up on them and shoot them several times in the back on the off chance that they happened to have a gun which they might pull out and try to be a hero with.
You've probably seen the statistics (already posted at least once today) that show that you're three times as likely to be a victim of violent crime in the US as you are in Canada, the UK or Australia - which all have stricter gun control than the US. I put the difference down to the gun-culture (rather than gun availability) which is ingrained in America. The world is a much more frightening place if you think that the people all around you have the power to whip out a gun and shoot you. It puts a very different tone on run-of-the-mill violence like bar fights, domestic abuse and road rage. I'm sure you've heard the quote from (Heinlein? I thought it was one of your founding fathers, but maybe I was wrong): an armed society is a polite society. I'm sure this is true to a degree, but nobody can be polite all the time (see: New York).
For these reasons I would strongly oppose any relaxation of gun controls in my own country. On the other hand, I do believe that in the US guns are so ingrained that even if most of them were removed from circulation, everyone would still feel the same way and criminals would be the only ones who still had guns. A bad situation. Perhaps an armed populace is the right solution for the US.
Anyhow, lots of people have posted a similar sentiment to you. I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but this is where I'm going to post my dissenting view.
But it's different in Baghdad because, as we all know, Iraq is a third-world hell hole populated by murderous, religious fanatics that we don't care to understand.
And I hear that the people who were there before the Americans arrived weren't all sweetness and light either.
Whew, it's good to get that out of my system. There's something about innocents dieing that makes me want to insult people. I'm glad the opportunity for some good ol' America bashing turned up before I found something in really poor taste to say. Perhaps I feel obliged to water down the inevitable earnestness and righteous indignation.
I live there you insensitive clod! There very much is such a place as Oceania, it's a name for the region including Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and a couple of dozen other island nations in the South Pacific. It is widely used and understood in the region. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Normally I wouldn't take exception to poor geographical knowledge (mine is far from perfect), but some clueless mods modded you up so I feel the need to respond.
Um. Depends what you mean by 'a completely different lineage'. If I'm reading said book correctly, the last common ancestor we had with dinosaurs (and, by extension birds) was 310 million years ago. That makes dinosaurs more closely related to us than modern amphibians are, but less closely than monotremes and marsupials.
You could say that dinosaurs were from a different lineage, since we are not descended from them - but you could also say that they were important in our evolution because we shared a common ancestor with them, and comparetively recently at that.
In family tree terms, dinosaurs would be cousins of ours rather than parents or grandparents.
I agree with your points, but I have to speak up about that particular sentence. Sure, even terrorists deserve a fair trial, but that's the wrong way to look at the situation. Until a suspect has had a fair trial and been convicted you don't even know they're a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you think terrorists shouldn't have a fair trial - you need to give them a fair trial first so you can know that they actually are terrorists. Anything less is simply state-run kidnapping.
IANA(Anthrax Mailer), but I assume that the sinister white powder is just whatever crap you grow anthrax on, and as you say, you don't actually see the anthrax spores.
On the bright side, the paranoia isn't in vain. It's getting harder for the terrrsts. If you want to catch people off guard with anthrax now, you'll need to dye it a different colour.
I suggest dark brown, so everyone becomes scared of instant coffee. Mwuuuhahaha.
How we still classify birds as non-dinosaurs escapes me (though I also think it's pathetic that Humans aren't classified as apes). It seems that you have a pretty clear line. Fish -> Amphibian -> Reptile -> -> Dinosaur -> Bird. Just as we are Fish -> Amphibian -> Reptile -> Mammal-like-reptile -> Mammal. I guess it's all a sort of trouble with the taxon system. We tend to view certain animals as a species rather than the continuation of a gene pool that may or may not have branched off to other gene pools.
I only have a passing interest in evolutionary biology, but I thought Dinosaur -> bird and Ape -> Human were standard theory, from a cladistics perspective at least. Is there a particular classification system you're complaining about?
From The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (an intelligent and able writer, when he's not flaming the fundies):
Pterodactyls have less claim to be called dinosaurs than birds do. Birds are an offshoot of one particular order of dinosaurs, the saurischians.
I'm too lazy to read the link, but that sounds a lot like the prisoner's dilemma, which I'm sure many slashdotters are at least passingly familiar with. One of the interesting things about prisoner's dilemma tournaments is that it matters a lot what kind of strategy other players are using. If all your opponents are jerks (iron rule) you can't do any better than to be a jerk too; but if there are a population of co-operators (golden rule) then the using the golden rule becomes a better strategy as the number of co-operators increases. Not that I think that relates to the Google situation, I just thought it was worth mentioning.
I agree with you in principle, however my experience has only ever been with termination fees as a duplicitous tool - that is, no connection fee but over a hundred dollars early termination fee. This is a way to hide charges from the user - you'll only hear about the termination fee if you read the small print before you sign or you actually try to terminate early. I wouldn't have a problem with that kind of plan if there were a range available, but last time I checked I couldn't get a DSL plan from any local provider on less than a 12 month contract for any price (YMMV). That totally sucks if you're a student and you're not sure if you'll be living in the same place nine months from now.
Pish. Whoever modded the parent Flamebait probably doesn't know that the game was in development for a long time - it was previewed, with playable code I think, then disappeared from the games industry rader for a while. At the time I thought it had done a DNF.
I think it's because people are more likely to express, and mod, viewpoints that they feel strongly about due to of a gut feeling or moral outrage. The common theme between the up-modded opinions is that they're simple and negative. It's easy and cathartic to express strong opposition, as in "I hate the music industry" and "furriners are stealing our jobs". On the other hand, moderate and nuanced opinions like "Existing music licensing business models are outmoded, and we need to achieve a smooth transition between current models and innovative solutions to maintain a healthy musical culture" or "a global free market is inevitable, and is the only viable alternative to a future of eternally warring nations" are more difficult to express AND proponents of such views are less likely to feel strongly enough to post or mod a comment, since their views are not usually emotionally founded (how many people are rabidly in favour of outsourcing, even though many people think it has a net positive effect?).
More simply put, people who are afraid of outsourcing are more likely to post and mod than people who like outsourcing (or rather, pro-outsourcing people will still post and mod just as much, but they'll do it in discussions about different things where their emotions are more stirred).
This is just armchair psychology of course, but if it is correct I expect that most negative posts would be original posts (because the poster feels strongly about the topic) whereas moderate/supportive posts should be in response to negative trolls and flamebait, since the trolling would add the emotional incentive that the basic discussion lacked.
Even if the source code for the voting machine and code for the toolchain are audited, and the hardware is audited too, you just can't be sure that the 'clean' code and machine are what is actually in front of you when you vote. It's just a little bit more difficult for the vote falsifiers. Electronic voting will always suffer from a few people having too much control - the guys who designs the hardware, the guy who assembles the hardware, the guy who delivers the hardware... a conspiracy of half a dozen people could conceivably subvert the entire voting process.
Frankly, I still think that e-voting is a (poor) solution looking for a problem. Just ask all the other democracies that still use paper ballots.
Re:Similar stuff at Berkeley
on
Smart Sunglasses
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
- Jeremy S. Anderson
It's highly unlikely that adding genes or even an entire new eye could increase visual range, unless perhaps it was done immediately after birth. The Wikipedia article on Critical Periods is a bit lacking so I'll do this post from memory: basically there are narrow windows in the development of an organism where particular skills can be acquired, and if you miss out during that period you will probably never acquire the ability.
Language acquisition is a good example - if a child is, say, abandoned and raised by wolves then unless they are rescued and taught a language before they get too old (Wikipedia says 12 years) they will probably be incapable of ever learning to speak.
An experiment on vision (sorry, no reference) was done where kittens were raised in an environment with no visible lines at a particular orientation. The eye has specialised cells which exist only to detect lines at specific orientations. These kittens, when sufficiently mature, could not see the type of lines they had been deprived of and were not able to develop the ability to do so, evidently because they had not exercised the ability during the particular critical phase of their visual development.
I strongly suspect that enhanced colour vision would be constrained the same way - if it's not there for you to learn about during the appropriate critical period, your brain would probably never be able to pick it up even if your early visual system (eye) was 'upgraded' to deliver additional information.
Half a dozen people have already replied, but I think I can do even better (I'm not a karma whore, I just provide certain services to lonely... oh, never mind).
The problem is in multiple meanings of 'imply'. In casual use, 'imply' is synonymous with hint, suggest - e.g. How dare you imply that about my mother.
In formal logic, 'imply' is the English language way of saying a conditional; often symbolised by an arrow. A logician might say "Rain implies that it is cloudy", which could be represented symbolically and used in a logical proof like this:
R = It is raining C = It is cloudy
1 R -> C (Premise, if it is raining then it is cloudy) 2 R (Premise, it is raining) 3:. C (by 1, 2 therefore it is cloudy)
Note that in the logical statement R -> C, if R then always C, and if not R then maybe C anyway. If it is raining then it is always cloudy, but it could be cloudy without raining.
So, unfortunately, in the casual sense correlation does imply (hint, suggest) causation - but in the logical sense correlation does not imply (necessitate) causation.
I'm with you on this one. It's silly to claim that playing games exerts some kind of evil mind control, but it's equally silly to claim that players are entirely detached and will not form opinions about the games they play. FPS players who go/are nuts tend to 'shoot smart' - head and chest shots, don't waste ammo. But conversely how many sane Counter-Strike players would willingly go to war? They know all about weapons and cover, and they also know that even decent players get blown to pieces one time in ten. Who wants to risk their life on odds like that?
It's a shame it's so unfashionable to be a moderate.
Speaking of which, and not to contradict you, does anyone think that mutilated corpses on CSI aren't sexualised just like the rest of TV? When was the last time the chick on the slab was a dumpy 38 year old woman?
Presumably you were trying for those funny mods you got, but since you haven't had any sensible replies yet I'll chip in - you know somebody is going to take it seriously.
Volcanic eruptions are like earthquakes in that they are a release of built up pressure. Earthquakes happen at fault lines when two land masses have moved far enough relative to each other that the sides of the fault slip against each other to relieve the accumulated pressure. Volcanoes accumulate pressure from... uhh... magma upwellings or something... which is released when they erupt. Both are examples of a system in which there is a steady increase in potential energy which is catastropically released when enough energy is stored. If the rate of energy storage remains the same the eruptions/earthquakes will have a fairly regular period. Traffic violations aren't caused by any kind of build up of energy, so there's no reason to expect periodicity.
I personally think the whole Left/Right spectrum is utterly retarded. I can't believe how much of American politics is based on this false duality which reduces the entire spectrum of human morality and aspiration to Them and Us sound bites. It reminds me of the Love/Fear "Lifeline" from Donnie Darko and, to quote the film, "He asked me to... forcibly insert the Lifeline exercise card into my anus!"
You didn't mention this, but since you're from Australia you probably assumed that everyone already knows.
The correct procedure for dealing with autumn/fall daylight savings (gain an hour) is to spend the extra hour drinking as much as possible - it's a free hour! In spring (lose an hour) you need to drink extra fast to make up for the time you'll lose;)
Slashdot Mirror
To briefly recap another post I just made:
I'm from New Zealand, much like Australia except our police aren't usually armed. Gun-culture is completely different outside the US. Over here, the bad guys don't even carry guns. Because the good guys don't carry guns, a knife or blunt instrument is sufficient if you want to threaten people, and nobody needs to get scared and jumpy with a firearm in their hand. Win-win. In New Zealand, relaxing gun controls is clearly the wrong thing to do. In the US, the gun situation is so bad already that arming everyone may be the only solution.
I'll counter your opinion with one of my own. I live in New Zealand, where (as I understand it) a licence is required to own firearms. People do; mostly farmers and hunters with rifles. It's not very difficult. I've never seen a handgun, and I've only seen half a dozen rifles plus assorted air guns, bb guns, paintball guns and a couple of crossbows. Our police are generally unarmed, except for the Armed Offenders Squad who get called out for the rare armed nutcase such as in todays events. In New Zealand we don't have any cultural association with guns except as tools for hunting - specifically no second amendment style glorification of being armed.
You're probably correct that an armed populace would have ended the killings today much sooner, but as tragic as these rare events are, I'm much happier living in a low-gun society. My understanding of violent crime in New Zealand (never first hand, thankfully) is that it's based around knives and blunt instruments. Sure, being robbed isn't great, but I'd rather be robbed at knifepoint than gunpoint. I imagine the gangs like it too, since nobody wants to actually die in a brawl. Stab wounds are very survivable and running away is a practical option if things look really bad. I also feel safer knowing that my mugger doesn't think I'm going to pull a gun on him. I'm a total pussy, and hypothetically if I was robbing people in America I'd sneak up on them and shoot them several times in the back on the off chance that they happened to have a gun which they might pull out and try to be a hero with.
You've probably seen the statistics (already posted at least once today) that show that you're three times as likely to be a victim of violent crime in the US as you are in Canada, the UK or Australia - which all have stricter gun control than the US. I put the difference down to the gun-culture (rather than gun availability) which is ingrained in America. The world is a much more frightening place if you think that the people all around you have the power to whip out a gun and shoot you. It puts a very different tone on run-of-the-mill violence like bar fights, domestic abuse and road rage. I'm sure you've heard the quote from (Heinlein? I thought it was one of your founding fathers, but maybe I was wrong): an armed society is a polite society. I'm sure this is true to a degree, but nobody can be polite all the time (see: New York).
For these reasons I would strongly oppose any relaxation of gun controls in my own country. On the other hand, I do believe that in the US guns are so ingrained that even if most of them were removed from circulation, everyone would still feel the same way and criminals would be the only ones who still had guns. A bad situation. Perhaps an armed populace is the right solution for the US.
Anyhow, lots of people have posted a similar sentiment to you. I don't mean to pick on you specifically, but this is where I'm going to post my dissenting view.
But it's different in Baghdad because, as we all know, Iraq is a third-world hell hole populated by murderous, religious fanatics that we don't care to understand.
And I hear that the people who were there before the Americans arrived weren't all sweetness and light either.
Whew, it's good to get that out of my system. There's something about innocents dieing that makes me want to insult people. I'm glad the opportunity for some good ol' America bashing turned up before I found something in really poor taste to say. Perhaps I feel obliged to water down the inevitable earnestness and righteous indignation.
I live there you insensitive clod! There very much is such a place as Oceania, it's a name for the region including Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and a couple of dozen other island nations in the South Pacific. It is widely used and understood in the region. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Normally I wouldn't take exception to poor geographical knowledge (mine is far from perfect), but some clueless mods modded you up so I feel the need to respond.
Ooh! ooh!
In Soviet Russia, the KING captures KASPAROV!
Um. Depends what you mean by 'a completely different lineage'. If I'm reading said book correctly, the last common ancestor we had with dinosaurs (and, by extension birds) was 310 million years ago. That makes dinosaurs more closely related to us than modern amphibians are, but less closely than monotremes and marsupials.
You could say that dinosaurs were from a different lineage, since we are not descended from them - but you could also say that they were important in our evolution because we shared a common ancestor with them, and comparetively recently at that.
In family tree terms, dinosaurs would be cousins of ours rather than parents or grandparents.
Even terrorists deserve a fair trial.
I agree with your points, but I have to speak up about that particular sentence. Sure, even terrorists deserve a fair trial, but that's the wrong way to look at the situation. Until a suspect has had a fair trial and been convicted you don't even know they're a terrorist. It doesn't matter if you think terrorists shouldn't have a fair trial - you need to give them a fair trial first so you can know that they actually are terrorists. Anything less is simply state-run kidnapping.
IANA(Anthrax Mailer), but I assume that the sinister white powder is just whatever crap you grow anthrax on, and as you say, you don't actually see the anthrax spores.
On the bright side, the paranoia isn't in vain. It's getting harder for the terrrsts. If you want to catch people off guard with anthrax now, you'll need to dye it a different colour.
I suggest dark brown, so everyone becomes scared of instant coffee. Mwuuuhahaha.
I only have a passing interest in evolutionary biology, but I thought Dinosaur -> bird and Ape -> Human were standard theory, from a cladistics perspective at least. Is there a particular classification system you're complaining about?
From The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (an intelligent and able writer, when he's not flaming the fundies):
I'm too lazy to read the link, but that sounds a lot like the prisoner's dilemma, which I'm sure many slashdotters are at least passingly familiar with. One of the interesting things about prisoner's dilemma tournaments is that it matters a lot what kind of strategy other players are using. If all your opponents are jerks (iron rule) you can't do any better than to be a jerk too; but if there are a population of co-operators (golden rule) then the using the golden rule becomes a better strategy as the number of co-operators increases. Not that I think that relates to the Google situation, I just thought it was worth mentioning.
I agree with you in principle, however my experience has only ever been with termination fees as a duplicitous tool - that is, no connection fee but over a hundred dollars early termination fee. This is a way to hide charges from the user - you'll only hear about the termination fee if you read the small print before you sign or you actually try to terminate early. I wouldn't have a problem with that kind of plan if there were a range available, but last time I checked I couldn't get a DSL plan from any local provider on less than a 12 month contract for any price (YMMV). That totally sucks if you're a student and you're not sure if you'll be living in the same place nine months from now.
Pish. Whoever modded the parent Flamebait probably doesn't know that the game was in development for a long time - it was previewed, with playable code I think, then disappeared from the games industry rader for a while. At the time I thought it had done a DNF.
I think it's because people are more likely to express, and mod, viewpoints that they feel strongly about due to of a gut feeling or moral outrage. The common theme between the up-modded opinions is that they're simple and negative. It's easy and cathartic to express strong opposition, as in "I hate the music industry" and "furriners are stealing our jobs". On the other hand, moderate and nuanced opinions like "Existing music licensing business models are outmoded, and we need to achieve a smooth transition between current models and innovative solutions to maintain a healthy musical culture" or "a global free market is inevitable, and is the only viable alternative to a future of eternally warring nations" are more difficult to express AND proponents of such views are less likely to feel strongly enough to post or mod a comment, since their views are not usually emotionally founded (how many people are rabidly in favour of outsourcing, even though many people think it has a net positive effect?).
More simply put, people who are afraid of outsourcing are more likely to post and mod than people who like outsourcing (or rather, pro-outsourcing people will still post and mod just as much, but they'll do it in discussions about different things where their emotions are more stirred).
This is just armchair psychology of course, but if it is correct I expect that most negative posts would be original posts (because the poster feels strongly about the topic) whereas moderate/supportive posts should be in response to negative trolls and flamebait, since the trolling would add the emotional incentive that the basic discussion lacked.
No, no! not pâté, pate . Clearly these scoundrels are stealing the tops of learned peoples' heads to avoid researching the subject themselves!
Not sure what to have for dinner? I have a modest proposal I think you may be interested in ;)
If you're futureproofing, do it right: 640 million people should be enough for anyone.
Even if the source code for the voting machine and code for the toolchain are audited, and the hardware is audited too, you just can't be sure that the 'clean' code and machine are what is actually in front of you when you vote. It's just a little bit more difficult for the vote falsifiers. Electronic voting will always suffer from a few people having too much control - the guys who designs the hardware, the guy who assembles the hardware, the guy who delivers the hardware... a conspiracy of half a dozen people could conceivably subvert the entire voting process.
Frankly, I still think that e-voting is a (poor) solution looking for a problem. Just ask all the other democracies that still use paper ballots.
"There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
- Jeremy S. Anderson
It's highly unlikely that adding genes or even an entire new eye could increase visual range, unless perhaps it was done immediately after birth. The Wikipedia article on Critical Periods is a bit lacking so I'll do this post from memory: basically there are narrow windows in the development of an organism where particular skills can be acquired, and if you miss out during that period you will probably never acquire the ability.
Language acquisition is a good example - if a child is, say, abandoned and raised by wolves then unless they are rescued and taught a language before they get too old (Wikipedia says 12 years) they will probably be incapable of ever learning to speak.
An experiment on vision (sorry, no reference) was done where kittens were raised in an environment with no visible lines at a particular orientation. The eye has specialised cells which exist only to detect lines at specific orientations. These kittens, when sufficiently mature, could not see the type of lines they had been deprived of and were not able to develop the ability to do so, evidently because they had not exercised the ability during the particular critical phase of their visual development.
I strongly suspect that enhanced colour vision would be constrained the same way - if it's not there for you to learn about during the appropriate critical period, your brain would probably never be able to pick it up even if your early visual system (eye) was 'upgraded' to deliver additional information.
Half a dozen people have already replied, but I think I can do even better (I'm not a karma whore, I just provide certain services to lonely... oh, never mind).
:. C (by 1, 2 therefore it is cloudy)
The problem is in multiple meanings of 'imply'. In casual use, 'imply' is synonymous with hint, suggest - e.g. How dare you imply that about my mother.
In formal logic, 'imply' is the English language way of saying a conditional; often symbolised by an arrow. A logician might say "Rain implies that it is cloudy", which could be represented symbolically and used in a logical proof like this:
R = It is raining
C = It is cloudy
1 R -> C (Premise, if it is raining then it is cloudy)
2 R (Premise, it is raining)
3
Note that in the logical statement R -> C, if R then always C, and if not R then maybe C anyway. If it is raining then it is always cloudy, but it could be cloudy without raining.
So, unfortunately, in the casual sense correlation does imply (hint, suggest) causation - but in the logical sense correlation does not imply (necessitate) causation.
I'm with you on this one. It's silly to claim that playing games exerts some kind of evil mind control, but it's equally silly to claim that players are entirely detached and will not form opinions about the games they play. FPS players who go/are nuts tend to 'shoot smart' - head and chest shots, don't waste ammo. But conversely how many sane Counter-Strike players would willingly go to war? They know all about weapons and cover, and they also know that even decent players get blown to pieces one time in ten. Who wants to risk their life on odds like that?
It's a shame it's so unfashionable to be a moderate.
Speaking of which, and not to contradict you, does anyone think that mutilated corpses on CSI aren't sexualised just like the rest of TV? When was the last time the chick on the slab was a dumpy 38 year old woman?
Presumably you were trying for those funny mods you got, but since you haven't had any sensible replies yet I'll chip in - you know somebody is going to take it seriously.
Volcanic eruptions are like earthquakes in that they are a release of built up pressure. Earthquakes happen at fault lines when two land masses have moved far enough relative to each other that the sides of the fault slip against each other to relieve the accumulated pressure. Volcanoes accumulate pressure from... uhh... magma upwellings or something... which is released when they erupt. Both are examples of a system in which there is a steady increase in potential energy which is catastropically released when enough energy is stored. If the rate of energy storage remains the same the eruptions/earthquakes will have a fairly regular period. Traffic violations aren't caused by any kind of build up of energy, so there's no reason to expect periodicity.
I personally think the whole Left/Right spectrum is utterly retarded. I can't believe how much of American politics is based on this false duality which reduces the entire spectrum of human morality and aspiration to Them and Us sound bites. It reminds me of the Love/Fear "Lifeline" from Donnie Darko and, to quote the film, "He asked me to... forcibly insert the Lifeline exercise card into my anus!"
[/rant]
You didn't mention this, but since you're from Australia you probably assumed that everyone already knows.
;)
The correct procedure for dealing with autumn/fall daylight savings (gain an hour) is to spend the extra hour drinking as much as possible - it's a free hour! In spring (lose an hour) you need to drink extra fast to make up for the time you'll lose